Project Ember - Post 1

This being my first post, I'm gonna try to keep it short and sweet as I document the long and grueling process of producing a 3D animated short film with a crew of sixteen people. I'd like to begin by explaining a little bit about myself and the program I was enrolled in during my college career.

My name is Trey Buongiorno. I am a CG Artist whose skills include:

-Visual Development
-Concept Art
-Matte Painting
-Character Design
-Animation
-Lighting
-Basic Modeling
-Character Rigging
-Cloth Simulation
-Basic Compositing

I am continuing to improve my skills as I near my date of graduation, and I would like to pursue a career in story art, visual development for feature animation, or concepts/character sheets for creative projects and/or film.

The program I am enrolled in is the University of Central Florida Character Animation/Visual Language Program. I was selected along with 31 of my peers out of a pool of about 80. The program is growing and becoming more and more successful, with a higher quality of short film being produced each successive year.

Our first endeavor in the program was to develop story treatments that would evolve into the two final short films. Eventually, the films that are now known as Ember and Gaiaspora were selected, and I was selected to lead my peers on the Ember film.

My immediate reaction was to develop Ember visually, so I will end this first post by showing some of my better initial concepts that were done as development proceeded.

Ember was originally featured in a snowy environment, but there was a period of development where the location was open to change. I had pitched a Polynesian landscape, but we eventually reverted back to a colder environment to stress the importance of Ember's warmth.

At this point, I had mild technical knowledge about Photoshop and painting techniques in general, but still had a feel for visual composition and staging.

At this point, the cold mountains of Mongolia were selected as the final environment, so I did a more authentic and Eastern piece to celebrate that. Although this concept went unused, it did confirm one thing; that we wanted our story to begin in a mystical place, high in the mountains, with some kind of interesting landmark or shrine.

I would say that this piece gave us a lot to think about. Due to the technical limitations of having a fire character travel through snow constantly, we decided that patchy snow would be best.

This is as far as I'd like to go for this post. As we were concepting the environment, we were also designing the characters and all the camera shots in the movie, both tasks of which demanded my leadership and attention. I will go into further detail in the upcoming posts.