In this scene, I begin the story with the old man character pushing a large boulder along a riverside path. In my original storyboard, I was going to have man carrying a bundle of sticks, but after redesigning the old man from scratch, I found that his anatomy did not suit such a task. (His arms were too short to put around them.) I then considered different ways I could portray that the old man was attempting to move a very heavy load and decided that having him roll something along almost the same size as him would give the appearance to the audience that he was having a problem. I also attempted to show this with the grinding sound of the boulder moving along the path, and the occasional groans that the old man let up to show that he was struggling. In my original drafts of this scene, I did not have the boulder rolling, but after showing it to my peers and getting their feedback, I decided that it would be best to have the boulder rolling along the path as well, rather than just sliding.
When creating my scene, I made a river with a high bank on one side, and a forested bank on the other. In my original storyboard, the scene took place is a forest without a river, but when designing this, I found that it looked very samey and dull. You were unable to tell the difference when camera angles had changed and if the character had changed direction or not. I thought that by adding a river to the centre of the scene, it would mean that the viewer has a focal point or land mark that they could recognise very easily and distinguish.
As for lightning within this scene, I decided to use a single Omni-light to represent the moon light coming through the trees. I attempted to make the Omni-light seem more like the moon by changing the colour to a pastel blue colour, and turning down the shadow intensity to about 0.7 as to make them semi-transparent opposed to 100% opaque.
I used a target camera to pan along the river edge with the old man as he walks by the camera. I decided that it would be best to leave the camera on a fixed point and simply move the view finder. The reason I did this was because I thought that as the old man got further away from the camera, it would aid to perceive the distance the old man had to push the rock as it showed the path fade off into the night shadows. Also because I was using this for an opening scene, the gentle repetitive animation made for a good subject to fade in slowly from black from, as the viewer will not miss anything important in the early seconds of the scene.
The way I made the old man push the rock was to use footstep mode to have him do a simple walk animation up the path. I then key framed the boulder to move at the same pace as the old man up the path, so that the two objects were always in touching distance and one never strayed off by itself. I then began to manipulate the arms and hands of the old man so that they were out in front of him, as if he was pushing on the boulder to make it move. Once I had a walk cycle of about 5 steps I was happy with, I copy and pasted the posture to the rest of the timeline. I did attempt to use motionflow to achieve the same effect, but for some reason whenever I attempted to load the biped information my 3ds Max would crash to the desktop. Even though this way was time consuming, I still managed to get my desired effect.
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