Back to the house

Texturing

Alright so I took a break from the house to do those signs and character sketches but after a day or 2 I was back at it again. Cassie was busy doing almost everything to the store and the street by lighting, texturing etc, Jordan was away modelling our character and Caitlin was working on Sound and opening credits currently. That left me with a house that was unlit and untextured, so I felt it was up to me to finish my job on the house and get some colour and realism into it!

Before I started, I modelled some blankets for the floor, some socks and underwear, an extractor for the kitchen and using the cv curve tool, created some quick beer bottles. I then littered them around the room just to get that “slob tenant” vibe going.

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Not too shabby. After learning how to UV Map a month or so ago, it was still fresh in my mind and instead of what some of the other teams are doing, rather than put everything a boring-flat-lambert, I wanted to put some dimension and realism into the room. So I just took the walls and floor, planar mapped them automatically and quite beautifully the textures applied. Most of the objects thankfully only required an automatic mapping with the exception of some of the more complicated models. It did save me a lot of time, thanks to autodesk 2017 maya haha

I based the depressing decor off my Granny and Granda’s house that I practically grew up in. The portrait of Jesus on the wall, the tartan blanket, rug, old ass wallpaper etc. In regards to the wallpaper brick effect, I didn’t know how to tackle it. Do I model bricks and all that jazz or do I do a photoshop trick. I chose photoshop. I just an image of bricks over the wallpaper, erased around the edge’s to make it look like torn wallpaper, added a bit of browns and voila.

Character Designs

A group meeting was called because we realised we were neglecting our characters. We got together to discuss how they would look, because we needed them modelled as soon as. We quickly agreed that in regards to our research and lighting etc that we could look into a Tim Burton style of character, a thin, creepy, lanky character.

You get the Idea, we looked at Ego from ratatouille; a known thin-creepy dude for his slow paced, slow talking, insect like demeanour. I looked at Arkham Asylums Joker, another famous thin, creepy, pale-faced, sick looking villain that terrifies you with his unpredictable, menacingly ominous behaviour. We too looked at “A nightmare before christmas’s” Jack Skellington, another thin creepy character who is literally a skeleton. A good reference for our thin “skeleton like” character. I took a look at some of the songs he sang in the movie just to watch him saunter about, studying how this thin creepy character was animated to move. I did this too with the rest of the characters I looked at.

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My Character Concepts

Alright so, I whipped these up quickly enough. I didn’t need any digital masterpieces, just a rough interpretation of what I was thinking and these were enough. I experimented with some rough sketches in pen, just do get some feels for the character. I wasn’t sure about any of the character walk-cycles, how he would “creepily” search for stuff in the store, so I just did different character poses just to give the team a feel for his movements, how he carries his small body of those long pencil legs. As well as the character and his movements, we will also being seeing a lot of his hands in the shots, on the steering wheel etc, considering we’re doing it in POV as of so far. So I sketched out different types and shapes of long bony, creepy hands, in different positions (on the steering wheel etc) I just thought I was helping the team out by doing so and it will give the BBC and the class a good idea of the character when they see our group sketches in our presentation.

continuing forward…

Signs for Shops

Sketching on Photoshop

Taking a break from modelling, I had said to Cassie that I could do up some signs for the shops, they were all empty and I noticed that in most of the render-views we do of the street, the signs are visible. Cassie said just to do as many as I could and not to worry about whipping up 24 signs or whatever but I did a few, I thought that for the shops in the distance we can change the colour values because no one will be able to read the words.

Okay, so I came up with these; I gave Cassie a café and after I posted it to the group page, Jordan wanted one too so I gave him a bookstore so as he could come across intellectual and astute, you’re welcome Jordan. I had to do wee sketches or doodles for the signs, like the toastie, soup, coffee, books, fancy headers etc so it took me long enough to do the task. I thought it would just take an afternoon. I also noticed there was signs on the wall that Jordan had put in that didn’t hang above any shops, instead hung above benches and next to houses. So I said to the group that if it was okay with them, I could put in some suicidal awareness posters or support the homeless. I knew that once they are on the BBC Archive website that thousands of people would see them and maybe even one person saw the poster, I would have helped the world or somebody, a little tiny bit lol

More modelling! Yaaaaayy

Cassie was focused on lighting the store, incorporating are research into our lighting, creating aifog for the street and trying to figure out how to get it out of the store. She was busy wit that, so I took the model she had done of the house for the animatic and while she was busy doing other things I said that I would happily take it off her hands and add some more things to it, expand it a little. The poor man’s house was a box for crying out loud, he didn’t even have a toilet 😦

In the animation the robber walks up the steps and opens his front door into this box. It’s a nice room so far but it’s not exactly a house yet and I had the time and the energy to make something more fitting for our animation. I felt he needed a kitchen to cook food, a bathroom and another door that could be a bedroom he doesn’t sleep in for some reason. First before adding anymore models to what we already had, I wanted to create a bigger shell of the house.

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After I had done that I needed to put some more models in the house. Just Cassie’s models that looked almost bare in that room, looked even more so in this big hollow shell of an apartment, he needed a toilet, a bath, a jar for his tea bags, a desk to plan his heists etc. So if I wanted that I had to move swiftly on and get started, I played it safe and modelled the essentials first incase I ran out of time.

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Bathroom

I took it a room at a time, starting with the smaller bathroom. I couldn’t find any decent tutorials however and continued on to model them myself. I’ve been taking risks trying to model these essentials without a tutorial that could tell you how but, I had confidence in my ability as an amateur modeller to at least be able to model a bathroom. First on the list was the bath tub, I thought it was the easiest one to start off with to get me in the zone.

 

I modelled the tub, then taps and a shower curtain just to make it a bit fancier. I think it turned out fine without a tutorial, lets be honest, and now that I’m familiar with N-Cloth I was able make a shower curtain in 3 minutes. On to the next!

 

This toilet was an absolute nightmare to model! I must have attempted it about 4 times! Between smoothing cubes and using low poly spheres, I wasn’t sure how to attack it! So I smoothed a cube to make the toilet bowl, added the bottom half with a toilet seat and a water tank behind it. Turned out nice, it’s only a toilet like. Also added a nice wee toilet roll with holder 😉

Essentials? Maybe not, but I wanted to fill the bathroom out a bit more, I gave him a towel on a hook to dry himself and a toothbrush set because Oral Hygiene is important kids! I accidentally modelled a sink forgetting Cassie had already done one, I kept hers in but I may as well show you mine

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Kitchen

Alright so Bathrooms done, I moved on to the kitchen and modelled some kitchen essentials. The man needs to eat, he needs an oven and a toaster, he also need a fridge for his food. It didn’t take me long to get some models done.

 

Again I didn’t feel like I needed a tutorial for a damn Oven! It’s just a fancy cube with dials! Do we even need tutorials for everything?  I doubt it, anyway here’s the oven where he can cook his meals and stuff. Also featuring a hob, cus he’s “fancy poor”.

I modelled a toaster, his fridge and a sink; I love now that compared to last year when I didn’t even know how to begin a model, that I now choose what technique I’m going to use, or way I’m going to choose, to model something! Practice, practice.

 

 

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Living // sleeping room

I moved swiftly on to the next one, knockin out these models for the group! Next on the agenda was the living room, and Cassie had already did a good job modelling a bed, a nightstand, a chair, a few boxes and a television. So I didn’t really have much left to do, it was late in the night and it was either sleep or model some more, so I chose to model a few more things.

I really didn’t need to model that much but it just needed a few more things to make a house a home for this burglar. I modelled the things above, a desk & chair, a coat rack, and a front door, I also modelled a couple frames and a cross etc, but I don’t need to show you pictures of an empty photo frame. It’s barley a model.

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The house

Okay so, the next day after my models were done and I could not fill the empty shell I created, after a bit of feng shui and trying to get my feel of the apartment, where things should go etc, I came up with this. Voila! The house with furniture!

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Continuing to Model

Caitlin’s Beautiful Store Model

She had modelled the store and then modelled a few things to go inside it like helmets, sand bags, a cash register and a desk for it to sit on.

So for sooome reason, unbeknown to I, my group didn’t know what a military store was! and were getting it confused with the hanger in Indiana Jones that Alec had mentioned at the begin of the Ideation stage. So I took it upon myself to do a bit of research on what is in a military store, visited the 2 that our locationed in the town I’m in and yea… it was pretty much what I expected. They have ammo, equipment for air-softing rifles etc, helmets, jackets, camo etc etc..

It looks quite messy but I was able to single out certain items that I could incorporate into the store that would very clearly imply that it is some sort of “Military Store”. So to keep within the time schedule we set while also trying to help out my team and not just sit there like a total dingus, twiddling his thumbs waiting for his team mates to “do their bits”. I had my list of what I wanted to model to help Caitlin out, I sent her the list just to make sure we didn’t model the same things and I got started

First on this list was a hand grenade, so I typed it into YouTube and my ole friend Mike Hermes had of course already modelled one so he walked me through it and in half an hour I had modelled a Grenade! Think it turned out nicely and now I can add it to the library and have one for whenever I need it again. Take a skip through the video to see the full process.

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I didn’t need a tutorial for this I’m happy to say, I just thought a tutorial would have slowed me down and I think what I have it is a perfectly good model of a rifle for hanging on the wall on the back of the store where no one will see. I had modelled a hand gun for my last project so I have a better understanding of a gun and how I should approach modelling it. I have absolute zero interest in guns, or shooting them, air-softing, any of that. But I’ll tell ya! they’re super fun to model.

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The shelves were looking bare, and in all of the images I looked at on google as well as the 2 stores I visited, it wasn’t just boots and helmets but boxes of ammo and other things on the shelves. So I wanted to recreate something that would emulate that, I took a cube, made it a box, took some other cubes/cylinders, put them in the box and used N-Cloth to create of nice wee boxes of “materials” and a larger box that imitates a box of clothing. I like N-Cloth, it’s fun to play about with and easy to create some simple but effective things. Below is an Irish flag I created using N-Cloth, my first attempt at using it #proudtobeIrish

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After I had done the boxes and I was still playing about with N-Cloth, and because I couldn’t find any tutorials in maya on how to create a t-shirt, I decided to wing it and attempt my own. First I created a shabby model of a shirt, lookin all stiff and what not, made it an N-Cloth material, the hanger a “passive collider” and “point of surface” merged the vertices and let the t-shirt hang off the hanger as much as it could just to see what would happen, granted not much did but it was just an experiment. I then duplicated it, put a few on the rail and voila, “t-shirts on a railing”

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A step-ladder, nothing special

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Next on the list was boot, I hadn’t modelled a anything similar to it before so I went to YouTube to look for a helpful tutorial and found the one above which was more than informative. I followed along the video using the same reference image that the YouTuber “Lynx0123456789” kindly attached and voila, a boot… and his “mirrored” friend.

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The last thing I modelled before Caitlin asked me to send my models to her so she could piece them together in the store was this model aeroplane. I created it to hang from the ceiling. I didn’t use a tutorial but I did use this reference image and it was simple enough to make.

Beginning to Model

So today we got into groups to discuss what had to be modelled because it was the only next step after finishing storyboards and animatics. We had nailed down the concept, the plot, the timing and now we continue on to modelling! hoorah! My favourite part indeed, and because I’m such a gentleman, I allowed the rest of the team to get first dibs on what they wanted to model.

What needed modelling;

• The Store- Caitlin
• The Street- Jordan
• The House- Cassie
• The Car- Myself

I was in charge of modelling the car and I had full control of what the model would be and how I would choose to model it, while of course still having to keep in tone with the rest of the groups style.

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The group had mentioned the idea of it being something like a “Classic Ford Mustang” or as different as a “white//black transit van” and we also considered modelling the same car as the trotters in “only fools and horses” but they said that they trust whatever outcome I come up with, they are merely ideas, fuel for the fire if you will!

I watched the tutorial above on how to model a car as well as some videos on my digital tutors account but as I was watching it I knew it would take me about 3 full days to model this car and i just though that was a waste of time and energy! Especially considering I said it shouldn’t take me too long and that when I inevitably get the car done I can help Cassie or Caitlin with the store or house.

So I started brainstorming on how I can create this car, is there a better way? A lazier but just as efficient way? A better car to model? So I brainstormed the entire rest of the day to think about the best way to tackle this objective. I was talking to Caitlin about it, telling her how stumpted I was. That I might have model this car over the next few days ignoring any other priorty and she was saying I could model “a cute wee truck or something”. I liked the Idea of it, she explained that it can still have the same comedic effect as the “Delboy and Rodney” car but would look well and perhaps fit in better with the 1960’s Millhill London location. I had looked at the store she was modelling that she had based off one of the apartment blocks in Disney’s 1961 “101 dalmatians” that was just sooo beautiful man, and I loved the style so I looked into the cars that the characters drove in that to see if I could get some relevant and similar inspiration to match her style.

In my research I discovered “Horace and Jaspers” Dog Catching Truck that they drove, that I thought could work really well with the story, a 2 seater truck for our 2 robbers to sit in side by side like a villainous Disney duo.

There was no tutorials fir it quite obviously and based off these 2 images I acquired I attempted to model it anyway, I had watched enough modelling videos over the past year and a half and was starting to get that next level understanding and appreciation for modelling. A challenge was something I needed, something to give me an Idea of where I’m at before I start doing “modelling” as my specialized area.

It took me roughly 5 hours to model but here is my finished Truck for our animation;

I’m happy with it, I think it turned out okay and the team thought it was “super cute” and were happy with it as well so all is well, just as effective as a ford mustang that would have taken me 5x the amount of time as it took me to do this truck

2D // 3D Animatic

 

Cassie kindly edited the 2d animatic together using Jordans and my storyboards, including the sound and timing it all out which would help us with our 3d animatic.

So quickly moved onto the 3D Animatic; we had to model animate and time out our animation, so we had to get crackin

 

I modelled this basic ass car for the animatic after I was done with the storyboards so I could help Cassie out with it, didn’t seem fair that I was drawing and she was doing a 3D an animatic. I modelled both the outside and inside of the car for animating, but cassie was happy enough to animate the scene in the car. I modelled from 20 seconds in for the robber going into his house.

Storyboards

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Just because I was feeling inspired, excited and we were on a role, I whipped up a quick storyboard of what I though would have been a good idea for our animation. I tried to come up with something that was simple, something we would get done on time, something that could look beautiful and incorporate everything we had thought about and researched, something that could emulate an interesting message and something that would have been perfectly acceptable for the final animation haha.

“We (the camera) approach the door quite cautiously, with a muffled and frightening scream of pain or angst coming from inside the apartment. The door is already open and we creep into the apartment, we see a shadow reflected in the kitchen, a shadow in dispair. We slowly pan around the apartment, looking at all the clues in the apartment that might suggest why the distressed character might be screaming, the radio plays the BBC script audio and we slowly unravel the clues around the room that suggest whom this character may be. We pan up to the kitchen were the shadow arms out by his side, screams out in terror or pain, we here a thud and the camera creeps into the kitchen, turning round the corner to reveal a person lying in his kitchen glowing illuminously green, like the radioactive paint has consumed him”

The guys appreciated the idea, but were quite set on our other one so we decided that we would whip up storyboards for that rather. Perhaps I was playing it to safe and I didn’t wanna take the fun out of it all so we tried something more challenging which I could appreciate, I do like a challenge. Our spilt screen animation requires 2 storyboards to show what each character is doing so we split it in 2. Jordan took the driver and I took the robber. Heres what I came up with;

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The journey of the robber from raiding the store, to finding the box of illuminated scrapings on the table, hopping in the car, driving home, discovering the radioactivity on his hands, hearing the broadcast on the radio and washing the dangerous radioactive material off his hands.

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Below is the storyboards that Jordan did and after he gave me them I put them together side by side on a new storyboard. I just used photoshop to put them together, wrote under each panel and did a wee scribbly “storyboard” design to jazz it up a bit for the presentation.

Finalising ideas

So we settled on the plot of our animation; the split screen concept that I had explained in my last post.

“The driver pulls up to the curb just outside the store, the headlights turn off and his compadre steps out of the car and makes a bolt for the store. He breaks into the store through the front door and barges in. All the while the driver sits anxiously and impatiently in the car watching out for any sign of law enforcement, tapping his fingers concernedly on the steering wheel. His partner in crime returns to the car and he drives him home. The driver continues home while his friend walks into his small apartment, where he turns on the radio that broadcasts the script we were given informing that the men who robbed the store touched radioactive paint scrapings, that could result in damage to their body’s in later life without immediate medical attention.”

Now what we have to consider is lighting, textures, models, style, and camera.

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NEO-NOIR

Following the research we looked at including Drive, Bullitt, The day of the Locust, To live and die in L.A etc. Notice that the Neo-Noir tone is quite consistent in the research we were doing so I took it upon myself to do some research on it and get back to the group.

Film Noir is French for “Black Film” or “Dark Film”. It encompasses a range of plots: including the central figure of a law-abiding citizen who was lured into a life of crime (a concept I thought worked quite well with our script). Film noir consists mainly of low-key lighting schemes, also mainly associated with stark light and dark contrasts, like dramatic shadow patterns and the classic “light shining through venetian blinds”

Through my Film Noir research I found out a painting technique I had never heard before with a beautiful Italian word called “Chiaroscuro”- an oil painting technique (developed during the renaissance) that uses strong tonal contrasts to model 3 dimensional forms in dramatic effect.

Film Noir is very much cliché and would consist of quite “cliché” things such as [ciggerettes, rainy streets, black/dark, mournful, guns, lipstick, bogart etc] Also still quite beautiful but cliché instances like the shadows of the venitian blinds or banister rods casting shadows on the actor or the wall. The charcters faces may be partially or wholly covered by darkness, the camera shots would consist of low-angle// wide angles// skewed & dutch, all inspiration that we can include in our animation.

We also have aspects such as;

• reflections in mirrors
• frosted // distorted objects
• cinematographic choices that emphasize the storys mood & theme
• angular & confusion shapes caught in a tangible vortex
• voice over narration used to structure obscure narrative sequences

I watched this, a BBC four 2009 documentary called See America Through a Strangers Eyes, that goes over the rules and clichés of a film noir as well as a “defining film noir” dissection video on Youtube, both very helpful and interesting videos.

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POV- point of view

I had also looked into the concept of POV camera shots // editing. A concept we were gonna use in our animation. The technique of POV is one of the foundations of film editing. It can be used over the shoulder as well, which can partially include the side of the characters face, it doesn’t have to be as strict as “only through the characters eyes”.  Some films are partially or fully shot in POV, for example 1947 Lady in the Lake, a film noir which is subjectively shot in POV.

Back to Drive 2011, a neo noir thriller that includes POV shots so that you are coexisting with the character, seeing it from his point of view! The film is short and gloomy like a poem with a tough hard edge of a “neo noir art house feature”. In the movie the character almost never speaks and communicates mostly non verbally. The non verbal demeanor of the character softens him a bit, makes him a vulnerable person, a character that you can relate to more.

This is all just research and considerations that we can include in our own animation.

Brainstorming Idea’s

So we started the project today, brainstorming a few ideas based on our script we had read over the weekend;

Okay, so in regards to the ideas and interpretations of the script, we all chipped in quite equally so our ideas were quite jointed and communal. We had discussed an idea that involved a split screen narrative. Two characters with different roles in the robbery of this military store displayed on screen side by side.

“The driver pulls up to the curb just outside the store, the headlights turn off and his compadre steps out of the car and makes a bolt for the store. He breaks into the store through the front door and barges in. All the while the driver sits anxiously and impatiently in the car watching out for any sign of law enforcement, tapping his fingers concernedly on the steering wheel. His partner in crime returns to the car and he drives him home. The driver continues home while his friend walks into his small apartment, where he turns on the radio that broadcasts the script we were given informing that the men who robbed the store touched radioactive paint scrapings, that could result in damage to their body’s in later life without immediate medical attention.”

We also humoured the idea that we could create a sort of “infomercial” that would play the audio of the script we were given throughout the animation, that animated the effects and dangers of coming in contact with radioactive material, as well as educating the viewer however, maybe its too boring? Jordan and Cassie had mentioned a fallout 4 radioactive fallout warning video (below) It has a certain style to it, that if we recreated correctly could replicate our 1960’s theme.

We had also talked about an idea that closely resembled our story above but that incorporated a police chase scene after the robbery on the way to the house, a story that focuses only on the driver of the car. We stay in the car with him whilst his partner in crime goes off to rob the Military Store. Cassie had mentioned that she had looked at movies like Drive, Bullitt and The Transporter Trilogy, movies that centre around the protagonist of the story, the getaway driver. Whether the character has a silent eerie mysteriousness to him or a comical Delboy Trotter kinda persona, we can just exaggerate his personality and to give you a real sense of our character, how he interacts with the car, how he waits for his partner to finish the job etc.

I looked deeper into the film Drive, a neo-noir crime film based on the 2005 novel, A film that conveys so many ideas and emotions through images rather than words.

I watched this video on the lighting in the movie just to get a better analysis of why the certain hues, colours and moods are used. Something we could incorporate in ours because we like the whole ambiance of the film, the purple, blue and orange hues. The artificial light from the street lamps, headlights and bokeh of the distant lights, all really nice elements that could take our animation quite beautifully, to the next level.

The group mentioned a car chase scene that could occur after the store is robbed on the way to dropping his friend and partner in crime home. They again had looked at the car chase scenes in Steve McQueens action role from Bullitt as well as a video that Jordan had shown us of 2 ford focuses doing “chase laps” around the docks. As well to humour the idea I decided to throw in one of my fav car chase scenes; the mini cooper scene from Bourne Identity.

 

however we thought that this would consist of more work for us to have to do as a group. More to model, more to animate, more to light, and personally I think… unnecessary, I feel we can create something as good or better even, with something that required less effort than a car chase scene, that wasn’t mentioned in the story as well I may add. So as a group we quickly disregarded the notion, as fun as it would be.

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Still riding the brainstorm wave of “infomercials” and educational vids, we looked at the interpretation of taking a character and explaining the danger that he has put himself in by touching radioactive paint scrapings. While interacting with the character we take him on an emotional and informative journey of “Why you shouldn’t touch Radioactive Materials kids!”  You will most certainly not acquire superpowers.

I had remembered Troy Maclure; and YOU may remember him from such self-help videos as “Smoke Yourself Thin” and “Get Some Confidence, Stupid!”

He is a Simpsons character who often does infomercials or interactive self help videos

 

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We all had similar idea’s but at the end of the discussion a lot of it was still a little open ended. Alec had mentioned to us about Indiana Jones and the Hanger 51; the huge ware house in the 4th movie. But I thought that resembled a warehouse too much rather than a Military store, ya know? Regardless, he was just giving us a bit of fuel for the fire. Another possible idea he mentioned was the lighthearted “Delboy and Rodeny” depiction the story could use, which I think we thought was a good idea, it is the BBC after all.

I too had also trifled with the idea that would resemble something similar to the venom suit that consumes Peter Parker in the very poor, Spider-man 3 movie. The idea that after he touches the radioactive material it slowly and with the right camera shots “comedically” consumes him and he slowly transforms into a green radioactive Alien. At the end of the short animation when the script reads that they have to wash them selves immediately, we see the protagonist standing in front of the mirror as a gross alien and as he bends down out of camera to splash his face with water, he returns as normal. However the group were less enthused about this idea and fairly quickly disregarded the challenging idea and proceeded with an idea that best suited the research we had immersed our time in the past week, understandably.