Pre-production
Concept Designs
The early concept idea for this project was experimenting with real-time rendering engine (Unreal Engine 5) to test out making the open world map as set extension for the animation. While planning on a short film idea with the supervisor, the short film idea has turned into a teaser trailer due to the limited amount of schedule to finish it in time and difficulty of cinematic quality real-time rendering on the normal gaming computer.
Instead of using the open world map, I came up with the idea of exploring the underground city network inspired from my own experience with time at Seoul subway station decades ago (which is connected to every building entrance like department store, bookstore, museum, and indoor amusement park).
Storyboard & Animatic
After story and concepts idea is done, I started working on storyboard to understand how characters will place on the scene, and each event will take place inside virtual environment.
Animatics is a moving storyboard which helps how events will take each shot, but also useful as a reference for start working in animation. It is created using grease pencil tool and the rough 3d environment blocking inside the Blender.
At this stage, background musics and design of antagonist wasn't decided. While doing a rough sketch, it provided an idea of how it's going to look.
Click on the Video to Watch the Animatics