Drawing and refining (23/1/2014)

*First of all Ed showed me the lyrics to a song he wrote for the story reel. Really liking it, I felt it could be best used as background vocals for the establishing shot of the ship and its interior, similar to how the movie 'Alien' has shots of the crew's quarters with ambient music playing over it.

Speaking of which, I liked the idea of making the cockpit / controls unique with one of the ideas I had had for a while. This being a large ball of sentient water which floats in the air. The pilot would float inside it in order to simulate gravity loss, thus feeling weightless like the ship and being an extension of it.
However, we may go for a regular cock pit to not make things too complicated. 

* Spoke about the different emotions we would like to convey in the piece which includes the following.

• Optimism.
• Annoyance.
• Sadness.
• Anger.

* With the above in mind I then decided to make a rough list of characters and who would perhaps play them. Thus figuring out how much time we would need to spend on each one. 

• Captain - Me
• Pilot - Ed 
• Mechanic - Me 
• Muscle - Me or Ed
• The ship - Me or Ed
• Dock worker - Ed
• Extras - Me and Ed

We decided to leave the ship and muscle as undetermined for now as we want to think more about them before committing someone to the role. This is also so that both me and Ed have equal roles during the project.

* Afterwards we agreed that we liked the plot, but if we felt like it needed to be longer or stuff could be added we decided that we would add a marketplace and / or bar scene.

* I then remembered that I wanted to show my partner the radio drama that gave me the idea for doing this project in the first place, it was a 'Star Wars: Smugglers Gambit' which was performed in 2012 in the style of a classic radio drama that you can listen to below.

http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/2012/11/28/smugglers-gambit-full-audio/

* Before deciding on the voices, we decided to draw as many concept sketches as possible for different crew member designs. This would help us visualise a voice for them and perhaps think of some additional personalities or characteristics.

You can see the sketches below where I drew everything and anything that popped into my mind so as to not limit myself. Many of the designs in fact came from simply scribbling random lines and then drawing over them.

* Personally, I feel we need to put together a poster or two in order to make sure our story reel at the show stands out, otherwise at the end of the day all it is is a video on the screen that people may miss.
Ed totally agreed with this idea and mentioned that he could always play the song we came up with on the guitar. He also brought up that we could include all our work notes on boards placed either side of the screen. 

* Next week we will be sharing our idea as a presentation. Therefore, Ed will put together the presentation whilst I continue to draw further possible designs and a defined list of characters. The latter will preferably have a couple of examples for each one so as to give Ed a choice.

Harvard Referencing :

• Newman, K (2012) Smuggler's Gambit Full Audio. [Audio] Available at: http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/2012/11/28/smugglers-gambit-full-audio/ (Accessed: 23/1/2014).