A Pawn's Journey

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A Pawn's Journey

a short animated film

This project is the result of my dissertation. The field of work explored refers to audiovisuals and media production, more properly the digital cinema.

It consists of a 10 minutes short animated film and having has context's foundation the work of Lewis Carrol's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). In short, in the other side of the mirror, Alice founds herself next to a giant chess game. As she enters the game as a White Pawn, she has to cross it till the end to get to be a White Queen and win.

The main technique used to get the action presented in the video is known as Machinima. Although it has other potencials of use in fields of the moving image and new levels of interaction, it was used here has a tool to produce animation. Its particular characteristic is the use of animation (or moving image processing) produced in real time, which is very common in game engines. Game engines are the systems upon which most videogames run nowadays, capable of providing the users an experience of gameplay in real time.

Process

This project, also as machinima, is strongly connected with the concept of adaptation. From a written work of a very well known author we created a visual adaptation to videogames.

Some particular characteristics to have in mind, besides the work of Lewis Carrol used as inspiration, are the following:
- the use of content already existent: content from the original videogames or content created by other players (known as modifications, aka mods);
- the use of multiple videogames to film the distinct segments of the story;
- the mainly use of first view as the camera perspective.

The project consisted in the following steps:

Script. Here we created a personal written version of the original work. The main objectives were to gain a more profound and personal familiarization with the work, to reduce its content, and also to delineate it in scenes.

Storyboard. With this resource we illustrated each scene so we could have a visual sensation of the story. Again, we adapted and reduce more content, at some points even getting rid of entire scenes. Next is shown an example of some illustrations I did based on my perception of the original story.

Segments delineation. Here we established the different segments (group of scenes) of the story, mainly defined by the ambient where the action occurred.

Videogames to use. For each segment we explored potential videogames and then we chose one that appealed more to us in terms of satisfying the needs necessary to adapt the content of the segment.

Segments preparation. Here we made the necessary preparations in the videogames so we could proceed to filming. We treated resources such as local where to film, characters, mods, codes, objects, camera and plot adaptation.This stage was the most laborious one.

Filming. In this stage we put into action what was prepared and trained in the previous stage and we just filmed the on screen actions as they occurred, with the necessary interruptions for action triggering.

Video Editing. After getting the necessary images, we placed the filming in a sequence according to the story and we made the necessary changes to make the viewing of the video the more fluidly possible.

Visual Effects. Visual content not possible to get through the videogames was added in this stage.

Sound Design. Mostly all sound was maintained from the original videogames. However, some parts of the video received specific work such as the step's sounds in The Sims 3. We also worked the sound in general so that it maintains the same intensity throughout the video.

Soundtrack. With the background music we tried delivering to the viewer a more dynamic and amusing experience throughout the video. For this we chose music (under a creative commons license) that would might do a good pair with the more unique situations found in the video.