The Apothecary Week 4 - Hit the Ground Running!

Dated: 26 January 2024

This is our first production blog post since last semester! We have finally gotten our groups sorta finalized and we seem to be at a good position. Only three of the proposed short films have made it into actual production and they are "Bear in Mind", "The Apothecary", and "Liminal Sleep". I have been assigned "The Apothecary" with Gisselle, Minh, Oliver, Olivia, and Stefan. I am extremely excited to start working on this project as I think our group has a ton of potential talent if we organize it correctly.

The image above is the Miro board that we have started to work on. We are using Miro as it is a super easy way to collaborate with each other and it makes sharing reference extremely easy. We have also been able to get a Sync Sketch setup for our group exclusively so we can share work such as still images, animatics, or animations. We are mainly using Discord to communicate as it seems convenient for most of our teammates.

Story:

The biggest part of this week so far has been creating the timeline for our actual story. We have spent many hours trying to revisit ideas, brainstorming other concepts and we finally committed to an idea where we completely get rid of the second character. The story is entirely focused on the stress and anxiety that "Basil" will get from working too hard. The overall theme of the story is understanding the importance of self care and keeping a healthy mental state of mind with good habits. Some of the ideas we have had for the story is to have the entire film going dead silent expect for drips of water during the climax until the pipe bursts and starts spraying water in the Apothecary.

Our entire group is focused on creating style sheets for the environment, characters, animation, etc. along with the storyboards and revised beat boards for this film.

In this previous week, I have created the file structure along with a notepad with instructions on how to use the file structure in case anyone gets confused on where to put a file and why. I tend to think that the organization and that making sure files get to the correct spot is super important, especially for referencing in the future and keeping a healthy workflow.

Looking forward, I will be working on creating the rough layout of the storyboard with the general camera angles, assets, and how our film will actually flow from start to finish.

Environment:

Some of the environment and character development is coming along nicely so I want to share a little bit of what we have been doing recently.

These houses are some of the exterior shots that we will want to use for reference for the outside of the Apothecary that we will be making.

These are rough sketches of the inside of the Apothecary. The top left image is the back of the store when you walk through the front doors. It has a big table that separates the customers from Basil and it has a register on it. Behind the counter is a large amount of spices, spells, and whatever magic items are dangerous and cannot be put on display in the front of the store. Basil must retrieve those items when checking people out if they need any. The image to the right (top right) is the right side of the store when you walk in. We will have assorts herbs and plants hanging from the ceiling, along with the walls to dry. We also have a shelf of dried herbs to buy along with other safe products that people can use to create their own medication or spells along with cauldrons along the bottom, etc. The largest image (bottom) is the left wall of the Apothecary. It shows a fireplace on right side which will be close to the counter. It also has floating shelves with assorted, plants, gemstones, and any other items that Basil may sell in her shop such as like Frog plushies. If you looked closely, you could see that we will have large windows in the front of the store with benches in front of them in case anyone needs to have a seat.

Character:

We wanted to really focus on our main character "Basil" so we only have 1 character at the moment but we will make simpler characters to act in the "busy" store but we don't have any concept sketches of them yet.

This last image are some of the character sketches that we want to use for Basil. We looked closely and we think the bottom two sketches are what we want the hair to look like the most. We want to make sure we focus in on the fact that Basil is a hard worker and she may sacrifice her hair/looks to make sure she can effectively run her business. We also want to make sure we prevent as many sims as possible so we are planning on creating simple rigs for the hair and we will just rig the clothing as well in order to create a consistent looking film with neat and organized look development.

Color:

Olivia also created a color palate for the group so we can add color to our sketches when we are ready. This is what it looks like so far and all we really need to do is make a separate color palate for Basil and another separate palate for the lighting.

I hope you had a good time looking into how our project is going so far. I am super excited to get into the more complicated and technically demanding parts of the project, but that is for another day.