Oliver Thacker, BA (Hons) Computer Animation Arts, UCA Rochester

Currently, I am planning to make 3 rooms for my film: the cockpit, the Treasure Room/study and the Engine room. This is because I found them to be the more interesting rooms on the ship that have a lot of potential to be visually interesting. Of the three, I think the engine room will be the least interesting at the moment, so I may drop it to focus on the others. I'd also like to make the ship for an opening shot showing it off. Although these are just rooms, I am planning to animate parts of the scenery, such as having things bounce around in the cockpit, or the Treasures Tichy has taken from his adventures still moving or coming to life. I don't anticipate my film being too long. In my mind I envision it being a shot looking around the room and a couple shots looking at the more interesting parts of the room. I would also like to have something at the start of the film saying that this is my interpretation of the character, I had considered a voice over throughout, readi...

In the books, the twenty fourth voyage, Tichy comes across a race of people that have been turned into disks by a machine intelligence that was given control of the planet and told to make life better for them. It did this by constructing a grand and opulent citadel to lure in the citizens to convert them. The machine now spends it's time arranging these disks across the landscape. I initially thought of the Phantom zone from Superman, a prison in which Superman sends his most evil foes. The way it is presented on screen in Superman II is as a square space in which the prisoner(s) are trapped. I thought I'd apply the same idea here, that the citizens have been imprisoned in this form. I settled on the idea of having the citizen trapped within the disk that Tichy took (in my mind, the character takes souvenirs from his adventures), as well as all other disks, are trying to escape. I thought having a hand or even a head come out of this disk would look pretty interes...

Following advice, I have gone back and added detail to the hull of the ship. I started by being much harder with the shadow and light before adding texture in the form of overlays to add some depth to the spaceship. I decided to leave the orange strips alone and not add any overlays as I felt the ship looked more interesting with them untextured.

I couldn't decide if I wanted to stick with the red and silver colour scheme that I used on the previous ship, but I decided to go for a more classic silvery/grey set of colours with some orange highlights to make it stick out a little bit

These are currently the images I'm using when sketching and designing the elements of the ship.

I spent a couple hours trying to get down ideas for the main thing that will be in the engine room, the atomic reactor (that is what it is referred to in the book). From my understanding, atomic, or nuclear, energy is made using radioactive material to heat water, turning it into steam and using that steam to spin a turbine. I tried to have that in mind when thinking up these ideas, but for some I went for a more unrealistic approach that would look cooler on screen. The final one of these, number 11, I had in mind a giant wheel that would cycle the fuel rods when they run out of radioactive stuff. It would slide them out on rails and then rotate to the next, kind of like how a revolver pistol would work. Number 5 is also a favorite, I had in mind a battery when I drew it and thought maybe the ship is powered by a number of atomic batteries. I have also sketched out the bedroom and kitchen. My idea for all of the rooms of the ship is to have them look as if...

After looking at the construction of cars from the 60' and 70's, I have redesigned the spaceship to look less art deco. I looked at the shape of a few cars, the FSO Polonez [first image] and the Polski Fiat 125p [second image] specifically, drawing the shape of the car at first and trying to make a spaceship out of it. I didn't get too far this way so I decided to play around in 3d instead. I made the shape of the car's body and started to manipulate it, stretching, flipping, and generally messing around with the shape until I found myself with something that feels to me to be more of a sci-fi spaceship. New Spaceship I will now use this model as a base for adding on the details to make it look like an actual spaceship While I was in maya, I did have an experiment making the ship more asymmetrical. I was shown these crazy Polish movie posters which got me thinking that maybe the ship should be a bit weird too. However, I think they might be...