Adaptation Project | Paul's Blog

Written by Paul Tabarcia

“In the walls of Eryx” was the story me and my group chose to adapt into a two-minute animated short, the story follows an explorer in his search of priceless crystal on the planet Venus. In the excitement of finding a crystal, he is trapped in an invisible labyrinth and eventually dies in similar a fashion to the explorer before him.

As a group and due to the length of the story, we chose to focus on adapting only some parts of the story, this will allow us to focus on having a more coherent story which will be more engaging to the audience were aiming the animated short at. Our story will start of as a flashback sequence, to the protagonist’s cold death, while we will be focusing on emotionally recreating the events that lead up to his dead. The short will be lead by the protagonist’s monologue which we hope to create more of a connection to our audience due to the emotional situation our character is in.

The insert below is what our groups animated short will be based on:

For this adaptation project I will be in charge of the character design, as there are some limitation imposed by the story’s location, I had to ensure the characters design was appropriate and included some of the features the writer H.P Lovecraft spoke about in his story, an example of this is the protagonist mask which he needed due to the unbreathable air, although this removes the facial expression of the character, I feel like this is the right approach to provide our audience with another layer of immersion. Another aspect of the character I thought was important to add was the robotic arm although this is not included in the story, I believe it an important aspect to as it adds some backstory to the character without having to explore within it. The characters uniform was something that needed to look professional as he is a worker for an energy company, I wanted to make this more obvious by creating the logo on his chest and the side of his arm. One other aspect I want to speak about is the backpack with the communication antenna, this was important to us as the protagonist will be performing a monologue and we wanted to make a connection between the character and the audience, this way the audience will feel like they can hear his radio communication to the energy company which adds a layer of immersion.

The colours used for the protagonist were important to us as we wanted him to visible but not too look over the top, this is why we went for a sunrise orange complemented by dark and light greys which provides the character with more unity and will allow the character to be the main focus of the audience. Due to a limited production time I believe the 3d printing the mask and the shin pads will be the right way to go as it will provide us with more of a professional look while saving time as we can work on something else while they are printing, the 3d prints will also allow us to replace the mask or shin pads much quicker if they break, the rest of the character will be constructed using different plastics, cloth textures, rubber and foam which will be layered on top of our armatures. While shooting the short our character will be stabilised by magnets at the bottom of his feet being pulled to the magnets underneath the base layer of our set this will allow us to move the character more freely, this will allow us to keep the level of immersion high whilst not compromising on other aspects. The magnets I am planning to use have a pull weight of 2kg this should be more enough to support the character on one leg. Another option for stabilising the character were screws however these come with more disadvantages, such as time-wasting time unscrewing and screwing the feet in, damaging the sets which will reduce immersion.

Whilst I’m in charge of the character design, Katy is in charge of the background and foliage and Chohaib is in charge of the audio mix and monologue.

The insert below is the moodboard that helped me design my character: