Production Focus and Tips: The Undertals
by Vishka Studio
The purpose of creating the Undertals was to have a pre-production package to present to eventual investors and producers in order to establish a co-production opportunity and produce “The Undertals” as a television series.
The first thing we did was to define the scope of the task and set some objectives, some of which were the following:
Target Group: we decided to aim for a rather wide audience group of ages 5 to 12 while still making the series accessible to other ages.
Target Quality: although the objective was to create a series for broadcast it needed to be on par with or have a better visual quality than some of the works seen in the international markets.
Feasible Project: while aiming for a high-quality visual we also had to design and plan for a very tight production schedule and high output that could create the necessary material in a tight deadline.
Tip No. 1: The scope of your project is crucial to creating a high standard of work. Never stop planning and try to foresee and plan as many details of your project as possible. Some of the most important steps are the project scope, file-naming convention and your project directory structure. We have tried several combinations of these and we are still optimizing them for every project.
Tip No. 2: Put everything on paper. We tend to think that we will remember where we put our files and what we named the. Believe me your memory will not retain 80% of what you are doing in two weeks (and I’m being optimistic!). Write it down and if you are collaborating with a group try to create processes that would allow them to write down what they have done about the project. Word, Excel and Project or whatever software you tend to use are your friends; USE THEM.
With these goals in mind we started the task of research and look development by looking at a lot of children’s series and gauge the visuals and storylines they had. We also scoured the internet for images of environments and characters that we felt were unique and could be close to our style.
After that came the writing stage; we wrote extensively trying to flesh out ideas and come up with a story that would please us, writing a story, script, and synopsis as well as character and environment descriptions. With this information in hand we were ready to start production.
Tip No. 3: Even if you are working alone the writing stage should not be omitted. What is important in this process is that even if you are not a great writer just sitting down and trying to shape your story or characters will help you in finding ideas and inspiration that would not have been possible if you just started sketching or modeling. Writing will create questions in your mind and finding answers to these questions will make your project more robust.
We provided our 3D artists with detailed descriptions of our characters and environments and went through a series of sketches, probably 3 to 4 revisions for each object. Although we wanted the concept designs to be very inspiring we knew that we did not need to make them perfect since it would be easier to finalize them in 3D. Storyboards were also created in this stage since we were planning on creating a trailer for the series.
Tip No. 4: After each stage of production is completed create a preview of that stage. Benefits: you will have a making of your project, you will know exactly what assets have been created and at what stage they are, and you can show it to colleagues and friends for feedback.
