Initial Idea

Premises

All three premises below are to expand on the universe previously introduced in the past animation. The ending result will still be a stand-alone short.

Sequel to CGT341 animation where the previous main character is introduced and settled in the new alien world.
Magical fire dancer performs a spectacular spiritual display in remembrance of her now-deceased caretaker.
Action sequence of an assassin character taking down a giant mech in a sci-fi dystopia environment.

Story Plan

Setup – The animation begins with Lei'lani walking to the center of the shrine while carrying a pair of unlit poi

Catalyst – Lei'lani magically lights the poi and begins to swing them. Doing so also causes a burst of light to start her performance.

First Turning Point - While Lei'lani dances, mirages and illusions of small fish starts 'swimming' out of the water and begins to spiral around Lei'lani.

Final Confrontation – Larger wildlife such as manta rays begin to swim out. Lei'lani is then greeted by a massive whale with a large water splash. (Animation will end here if I'm short on time, as this is an appropriate stopping point)

Climax – Being awe-struck by the illusions that Lei'lani is seeing, she doesn't pay attention to her footwork and then trips, falling backwards as a result.

Resolution – Instead of hitting the ground, Lei'lani finds herself being held from behind! Acting surprised, Lei'lani turns her head back and finds out she's been caught by Lauri'thia's spirit. They both embrace and smile together, looking at the wildlife illusions that are 'swimming' back to the ocean.

Characters

Lei'lani - Lei'lani is a young, teal anthropomorphic sea-serpent. Her clothes are light and easy to move in, loosely based from a belly dancer. Lei’lani is generally always seen with a smile. She often acts cheery and childlike to try to brighten the mood to the point where sometimes her happiness is faked in an attempt to not worry others. While Lei'lani always liked to spin in circles all since she was little, she is a bit clumsy with her balance at times too.

Lauri'thia (Spirit) - Lauri'thia is a mature anthropomorphic sea-serpent. She has adopted and raised Lei'lani, and appears as a motherly figure to her. Despite that she is actually deceased, Lei'lani is attempting to call to her with a personal ritual that she's performing.

Setting

Fantasy Beach Shrine - The story takes place on a shrine located at an alien beach. The beach's plant life and nature structures resembles like what if you took the scenery of an ocean floor, and put it above water. Bio-luminescence is a common trait from the local wildlife. There is a stone walkway from the beach out into the shallow water. The shrine is relatively simple, resembling a bit like a more "ruined" version of the picture below. Ideally, there should be some representation of Lauri'thia in the shrine so we KNOW from the start that Lei'lani is performing a dance with an intent.

Treatment

1) We see Lei'lani walking towards the center of the shrine, carrying a pair of unlit poi being held with both of her hands. Flares on the side of the stone walkway burst up as she walks past them. She finally arrives at the center, standing firmly. Then, she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

2) Lei'lani simultaneously opens her eyes and lets off a magical burst radiate from her body. The pair of poi magically lights themselves on fire. We begin to see Lei'lani to twirl them around, with the flare trails visible.

3) Lei'lani begins with more lateral swings. We begin to see schools of spiritual tropical fish swim out from the water, spiraling around Lei'lani to somewhat match with her movements. Eventually after more and more species swims out. We then begin to see larger wildlife swim out, such as sharks and manta rays.

4) A giant spiritual whale leaps out of the water in time with one of Lei'lani's verticle poi swings. There is massive splashing that accompanies with the whale's accent and descent.

5) Lei'lani looks more and more dazzled with all of the glowing spiritual wildlife that surrounds her. Unfortunately, she misplaces a footstep, causing Lei'lani to trip over her own leg and fall backwards.

6) Lei'lani dramatically continues to fall, until she realized she is being held up by another figure! Taking a closer look, Lei'lani realizes it is actually it is indeed Lauri'thia's spirit that has been called out with her performance. They look at each other and giggle. Afterwards, Lauri'thia's spirit tightly embraces Lei'lani, as we see the spiritual wildlife swim back into the ocean.

Inspirations & Art Style

The main catalyst towards developing this animation idea was from a CGT 521 Graphics Programming project, where I developed a software that would render a diorama of Lei'lani dancing with like 10,000 spiritual butterflies mostly as a technical demo. This then lead me to think what if such a spellbinding display could form the basis of an animation that could further develop Lei'lani's character. Immediately, the first change would be turning the butterflies into sea life, due to the overall aquatic theme behind Lei'lani's character design. This project is showcased in a video linked below.

Audio

The characters will most likely remain silent throughout the film. There will be sound effects from nature. The background music will be a substantial component of conveying the animation's uplifting mood. The music needs to start soft, and then burst out once Lei'lani starts dancing. Music from the new age / instrumental genre should ideally suit the animation well. A music example is linked below.

Objective

The objective this term is to further learn the technicalities behind dazzling visuals in 3D animation. As a result, I'm planning to go for a more "Quality over Quantity" approach in contrast to how I worked on the short for CGT341. There is still going to be a story plan, but it may be more lore-light so I can place more emphasis on the visuals elements. While it would be ideal to fully implement my story plan, I'm more concern for visual quality at least for this semester.

Topics I plan to look into include to do my next animation include:

More complex character modeling
More complex locomotion
Clothing & hair physics
Particles... and lots of particles!
Simple post-processing visual effects

This idea is also a result from multiple inspirations from digital media: Major inspiration sources include:

Abzu (Game): Abzu is an underwater exploration game heavily emphasized on it's visual art direction. It has colorful landscapes with highly saturated colors, and it has large amounts of virtual wildlife swimming around.
Final Fantasy X (Game): In one major cut scene in this game, a main character performs a ritual dance on shallow water to appease the dead.
Aion (Game): One environment setting in this game is an living ocean world that has just magically surfaced above water. Most of the monster and plant design in these regions still have oceanic-based appearance.
Qinni (Artist): Qinni is a well-known professional artist on the internet. One of her 2D animations, Night Life, features a lot glowing flying goldfish.
Amadhia (Animator): Amadhia is a professional animator who has previously worked for many animation studios including Disney, Activision, and Warner Brother. Currently, she makes personal animated music videos featuring anthropomorphic animal characters.

The overall theme of the art style for this animation is to be bright and colorful. Objects will have at most simple textures, so there would not be much interference from level of detail. Lighting in the scenes would be turned up in order to have the overall picture appear bright and saturated. Objects will remain simple, but there will higher mesh detail for some objects in contrast to my CGT 341's animation.

The following collages showcases inspiring pictures I've found: