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Bathroom Stall Galactica Production Post #5

Writer's picture: Logan SLogan S

A production pass has come and gone, and the team has worked on the art some more. Here is what has transpired over the last two weeks.


One of the biggest pieces of feedback that our group got when critiqued by the class was that our art direction materials aren't super cohesive. Now, as three different people were drawing sci-fi objects, and none of us are super great at drawing, some discrepancies had formed. This week was focused on unifying our style and creating a cohesive set of rules for textures and aesthetics. My job this week was to create some rough drawings of some props that will be used to antagonize and surprise our protagonist Jeremiah during the film. I drew a flamethrower, a punching glove, and what was supposed to be a mixture of a spiked flail/Van de Graaff generator. These were some quick sketches in Photoshop.

These drawings prompted a rather spirited discussion between me and one of my team members, that sort of fundamentally challenged our priorities in the short. The discussion was based around the inclusion of these little yellow vials I drew in, which were meant to signify the source of power for the gadget in question. While the concepts were straight forward in my mind, my collaborator viewed them as over designed and complicated, and ultimately not in service to the plot. It came down to a discussion of whether an object like the punching glove being too realistic loses its comedic value when it had too much intricacies, if the character of a robotic punching arm wasn't as funny because it was too complicated.


After tabling the discussion for a little while, a reasonable compromise was reached that ultimately worked well for the story. It was decided that gadgets dependent upon a robotic arm such as a punching glove, the arm that stick the neck pillow on the character, and the other articulated gadgets would not have these vials. However, the heavy duty weaponry such as the flame thrower, the rocket launcher, and the turret would all have them. The reason why is our character at some point will grow so furious with the chaos that he rips the turret off the ceiling and shoots it all over the room. The power sources being attached to the weapons allows it to remain functional after being disconnected from the rest of the ship, so the object that needed the vials the most ultimately got to keep it.


While my collaborator and I disagreed during this discussion, it was a good moment to see how much we both care about this short. I think both of us are happy with the end result even if it took some litigation to reach. I appreciate my other teammates for weighing in and ultimately redirecting the discussion when it got repetitive. It's easy to go in a loop but the discussion was useful for how it ran its course. That's all for this week, next week will hopefully be the beginning of some new modeling!

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