Research and design document Virtual Reality movie

Virtual Reality Movie Design Document 2015 - 2016

Student: Sandra Yuen Student number: 464474 Internship coaches: Deny Smeets, Ger de Vries Organization: CHECK-IT group 13 Company: ZHJLAB School: HAN University of Applied Sciences School year: 2015 - 2016

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Content Introduction 5 Purpose of assignment 6 Subject: Fermi’s successor 7 Target group 8 Mind maps 10 Moodboards 14 Research on subject

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Storytelling

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Introduction

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urrently I’m completing a Bachelor’s degree in the major of Communication and Multimedia Design at the HAN University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. I’m in my 3rd year of study and therefore I have to conduct a 5 months internship. I choose to do my ininternship abroad is, because I want to gain more experience in my major field from around the world. I wanted to do my internship abroad to experience the international business world and to learn, improve and develop new skills.

Therefore, I got the opportunity to choose my internship abroad in Xiamen, China. China is one of the biggest international business country of the world and I will gain alot of experiences and develop new skills by working abroad.

In this internship report I will describe my project that experiences during my internship period. The internship report contains an overview of research that I have done for the internship company and the activities, tasks and projects that I have worked on during my internship.

This internship seems convinient for me, because I’m a chinese but I cannot speak Mandarin only Cantonese. It is a bit difficult in the beginning to communicate with people in Xiamen, because they only speak Mandarin which it is different what I speak.

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Subject: Fermi’s successor Brief story outline An alien life force is patrolling the universe to maintain the natural order of things. The user becomes this alien life force, which is scanning destroyed planets. It finds Mars and Earth which are indicated as troubled planets. It sets sail towards Earth to restore order and preserve the planets. Once arrived at Earth the user sees a waste land, using his spaceship the alien time travels through the history of the Earth showing the different stage of the planet until it locates the destructive force that made the planet into a waste land.

After indicating the human race as the cause of the destruction, it decides to kill all of the human specify to make sure that they do not damage the planet. After wiping out the humans it return back in orbit to fulfill his task.

Scene summaries Scene 01 “The Universe”: An introduction scene to the background story. The narrator introduces the story while the user is flying in space. It will be picked up by an alien spaceship where it is introduced to the protagonist.

Scene 02 “Navigating to Earth”:

Purpose of assignment ZHJLAB is a real estate company. The company wants to expand their products and come up with this porject to be their new product line in the future. The new product line is to create non-interaction virtual reality movies.

Nowadays, technology is developing much faster then you can think. Therefore, Virtual Reality movie is very new on the market and this will be the future concept 3D movie that will be created.

This assignment is to prove real estate company can also make virtual reality movies and its becoming more realistic than ever. Virtual reality will give you the depth, feeling and immersive view like you are in the reality world.

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The user becomes the protagonist and is awoke by it system. A troubled galaxy has been detected and the hologram requested to be reviewed. The protagonist is skipping through planets until it decides to set course to Earth. On arrival it descents down to Earth and takes in the environment. It starts to dismantle his ship pods to prepare for time travel.

Scene 03 “Time traveling”: The protagonist starts the time travel sequence and is introduced to the history of the world. Its previous life forms and landscape. it speeds up time to see what has happened to the planet over time.

Scene 04 “Destroying humanity”: The protagonist has identify the human race as the source of the planet deterioration. It decides to kill all of the human to preserve the planet. In an epic scene all human life is destroyed on Earth while other specimen survive.

Scene 05 “All as well”: The protagonist evaluates the planet without humans and sees a proper future. His task has been completed and he returns back in orbit. His job is done and goes back into hibernation mode in search of next job.

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Users viewers/ target group The target group of this Non Interaction Virtual Reality Movie will be gamers of 30 - 35 years old. This target group is selected, because the first Virtual Reality is already launched in the game field. Therefore, most of the gamers already knew about Virtual Reality Game, but not Virtual Reality Movie.

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This paragraph is about brainstorming and making mindmaps to have an idea what we are going to make. In the picture above is the mindmap of “Space”.a What would you think when someone says “Space”. What kind of action would take place in “Space”?

All these kind of question will be easily answerd by making a mindmap.

This will be the first step of research and design everything. We need to have every ideas in one point so we can focus on that point after all.

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In the mindmap you can see what kind of object will be in the space. From those object we can think on further ideas to make it more storywise.

This is the second mindmap that I make during the brainstorming session for the movie “Fermi’s successor”. I choose to do a mindmap about the earth, because there is a scene that the user will land on earth. Therefore, this mindmap is usefull for designing the environment of earth. With this mindmap you can see in what idea or scenes I am aiming for.

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This is another mindmap to expand my idea for designing the character in the movie. There will be one character in the project/movie as mentioned in the previous paragraph, the user will be become the protagonist. This character is an alien, piloting the spaceship in space. During this brainstorming session all ideas come together and base on the mindmap I can decide which style or concept do I need to work on. There are actually alien races according to NASA’s research on the moon. We don’t know if there are really exist, but we sure know if we as human can servive on this planet why can’t other races live on other planets.

That is always a question and something we really don’t know, because the space is limitless. According what we as human know about other races is that these aliens might be look like human or maybe not. It can be robots or else. From these kind of ideas I need to decide which kind of alien race can we use as a character for the project/movie. I decide to have a humanoid alien race as a character. Furthermore, there are also several points that I need to focus on after choosing an alien race. How does the alien looks like? Does he has big nose or several nose? All these questions need to be answered before creating this character.

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In this last mindmap I am going to brainstorm about the spaceship. The spaceship ie spaceship is the most important asset of the entire movie, because the spaceship is the first object the user will interact with. The first thing to think about is the shape of the spaceship. What kind of shape do we want or fits best in the movie. The director Frank Bloemendal of the movie requires that the spaceship needs to have 4 pods attached to the spaceship. These pods will function as time travel machines.

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Moodboards Moodboards are use to visually illustrate the style that I wish to pursue. However, it can also be used to visually explain an imaginary setting for a storyline.

In the next paragraph there will be more moodboards about the storyline of the movie.

These moodboards in this paragraph are just research on the subject of the project/ movie.

This is the first moodboard that I have made for the project/ movie. By making this moodboard I have gathered materials and reference images intended to evoke a particular style. This is a general moodboard for the entire. In this moodboard you can look and feel the general idea of the project/ movie.

From the moodboard it’s clear to see that the General moodboard main idea or subject of the project/ movie is about aliens in the space. Furthermore, there are also some typical colors that I have selected. The light blue color is actually the main color of the moodboard, but this color is blended with purple to create a mysterious effect. I have choose these colors, because it’s very common that we know that aliens have capacity in high advanced technology and these colors can bring out this kind of effect. Traveling in space is overall dark, this means the best color that I will be the best is the light blue color. Furthermore, I already have an idea for the alien race, it will be humanoid alien.

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Interior moodboard

Here below you can find the moodboard of scene 02, because the the moodboard for scene 01 is already made by our producer Frank Bloemendal. Therefore, I start to create another one for scene 02. I start to think about the environment that could be in the scene and assets that could be used. Scene 02 is about the user becomes the protagonist in the controlroom of the spaceship. Therefore, I need to make a moodbaord to visualize the idea/concept of the interior of the spaceship. The main assets for the interior of the spaceship are the hallway, controlroom, windows and holograms. These assets need to be visualize first, because the user will interact or go through these assets in this scene. This moodboard also lead to the storyline of the user being the protagonist and set the location to the destroyed earth.

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Spaceship moodboard

This is another moodboard that I made for the spaceship. In this moodboard I also choose a colorpalette that we can use for the spaceship.

From the moodboard the spaceship has a dark color from the outside with some blue accent color to make it visible in the space and it is a massive huge spaceship. Furthermore, the spaceship has big glass windows infront of the spaceship around the cockpit.

The spaceship will not be look like futuristic modern of shape. It will be “Alien” shape, This means an uncommon shape that we are used to.

be 4 parts and these parts we can use them as engines of the spaceship. By thinking unlogical unlike human, these pods are for time traveling, they do not exactly have to be engines. We know that we need to put some engines on an object or vehicle to make it fly, but these are aliens and don’t need engines to fly maybe.

These 4 pods could be attached to something to the spaceship or maybe there are some kind of mystery force holding them together.

It has to be a different shape that we as human will think it’s an alien spaceship, it is not made by human.

At the back of the spaceship there will 16

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From the interior moodoboard I want to illustrate my idea how the interior of the spceship will be. As I know, we are going to have a massive spaceship. Therefore, I design the controlroom into 2 parts. The first part is the controlroom where the user become the protagonist on the chair while hybernating from the long distance traveling. The controlroom is in the front part of the spaceship, on the tip of the spaceship. There are big glass windows around the controlroom where you can have a clear view of the galaxy when traveling.

Furthermore, I have an idea to put an entrance on the ground like the reference image in the center of the moodboard. This entrance is connected to a hallway. The user will entered the spaceship from this hallway to the controlroom. I thought about just putting a single door at a wall, but that doesn’t have any challenge and nice effect to the scene.

Interior moodboard

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For the alien character I decide to make it human like. The alien will look like a human, but with a different shape of face. You can see in the mood board that the alien will have 2 hands and 2 feet like a human, but the face is different. The skin type is also different compare to the human race. In the mood board I choose the alien race to be peaceful, because the story about the alien is that he will restore the destroyed earth. If the alien looks evil then it will not fit into the story/ concept what we have now. It will give the user another feeling about what the alien is going to do on earth. Furthermore, the alien will have a some kind of armor like the third alien picture in the moodboard.

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Research on subject In this paragraph, traveling in space research on movies of inspiration for that I really want

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I did some searched on the subject of our project which is alien to the earth. Therefore, I think it will be interesting to have some that are related with the project. Based on these movies I got allot our project, for example “Avatar� movie is one the most inspired one to have an environment like that in one of our scene.

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Storytelling

Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, sound and/or images, often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation, and instilling moral values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot, characters and narrative point of view.

Storytelling is actually my main task in this project. I did storytelling before in my previous Game semester and have some experience. Storytelling sounds like something fun and easy, but it is not easy as it looks like. What I have done in my previous semester was very simple tasks compare to this project. Storytelling is not only like telling a story, but you need to get inside of the story and imagine you are part of the movie. I think the difficult part about storytelling is all the details that we need to go through with, every single details need to be analyzed and sketched out before designing. In this paragraph I am going to explain what I 24

have done as a storyteller for the project. Besides of analyzing the story I need to also make moodboards for each scene. These moodboards are actually almost the same as the one that I made in the research paragraph, but these are more accurate to the real object and environment that I want the scene to have. furthermore, I also need to create floorplans for each scene so the programmers can see from the floorplan where to place what object and is the distance between each objects. The final step of story telling is to create a storyboard for each scene. A storyboard is a graphic organizer in the form of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence. In the following paragraph I will describe each storyboard for each scene.

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Short story: Candy Island There is marine who just woke up at the beach. He looks confuse and also lost. He stands up and look around, he is on an island. This island looks a bit strange, because he is never been here before.

He sees a forest and walks into the forest. The forest is foggy.

The marine can barely sees his own hands, but he keeps on walking through the forest. Suddenly there is a strong, bright light shining through the trees. He walks forward and uses both hands to seperate the leaves so he can see what is going on there. The marine is shocked and freezes for several seconds. He is surprised what he is looking at.

He just find an entire different world in the middle of the forest.

This little world is surrounded with water. everything on that land is made of candies. There are so many candy trees and there is also a candy house. The marine walks through the candy land and stands in front of the candy house. He is starring at it like he wants to eat it immediatly, because he is very hungry. Meanwhile, it begins to rain, but it is not just rain of water drops. It’s candy rain, alot of tiny and big candies are falling from the sky. The marine starts to run to avoid the big candies falling from the sky on him. Finally he got out of the candy land and forest. He is back on the beach and sees a bamboo raft floating on the shallow water. The marine walks to the bamboo raft and jumps on it to see if it is stable or not. The raft is stable and he is thinking to use this raft to escape from this mystery island.

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Synopsis of Candy Island There is a marine who woke up unconsciously on an unknown island.

The marine has discovered a secret about the island. It looks like a normal island, but there is something special about it. He discovered a Candy land at the center of the island. The Candy land is surrounded by water, so it’s an island in an island. It seems like someone has lived there before, because there is a house in the center of the Candy land. The house is surrounded by big candies and ice cream and cupcakes. It’s a whole different world, because it even rains candies.

The marine passes through the Candy land and finally found his way back to the beach and saw a raft to get off the mystery island.

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Candy Cane

Spaceship V2

Bamboo Raft

Ice Cream

Lolli pop

Spaceship V1

Flat Lolli pop

Palm tree

After designing the story, the next step to design is the assets for the story. I need to design the objects that need to be used in the story. For making these assets I sketch out the assets first in my sketch book and then create them in the 3Ds Max software. The sketches I use them as a blueprint to create the 3D model. Above of the page there are several 3D models that I have created during my internship period. The candies are created during my training week for the Candy Island and there are two spaceship that I have also created for the Fermi’s Successor VR movie. I didn’t create so many 3D models during my internship, because my main task is storytelling. During my training week I have created several 3D models to demonstrate my skills and knowledge to the company what I am capable of.

There are several steps to go through before finishing a 3D model completely. The first step is to sketch out the object you want to create in 3D in a sketch book as a blueprint. The second step is to shape the 3D object in the 3Ds Max psoftware. This is called realizing your sketch and as last is to texturing the 3D object. Each object has a texture, therefore you need to use the UV Unwrap tool to texture the object. Most of the texture are made by myself in Photoshop software.

On the next page you can see some screendumps of my 3D model and how do I texture them using the UV Unwrap tool.

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My task as a designer is not only designing assets or the story, but it also include desinging the environment. This part of design is called realizing what you have made or imagine. By making the 3D models is also part of realizing your product, because you are developing your imagination to be realistic. During the training week in my intrship we need to make a Demo with a software called Unreal Engine. After creating a good storyline for our Demo, I have created some of the assets and as last we need to make the Demo in the Unreal Engine. I have experienced with Unreal Engine and therefore I took this task to design the environment in the Unreal Engine. It’s not an easy task to do, because I it was two years ago since I have experienced the Unreal Engine. My task is to design the environment of our Demo. In the first version of our Demo, I didn’t do that much of environment design, because there weren’t any requierement for the Demo. After finishing the first verion of our Demo, the manager of our company requiered us to develop our Demo into a higher level. Our manager requiered a realistic Demo, this means everything must look realistic. Therefore, I have took the task to developed and enhanced the environment of our Demo. By developing the environment it will increase the look of the environment. By adding realistic trees into the Demo increases the look and feel. Furthermore, I added some fog in the forest, to create the real feeling when you walk into the forest.

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Character description Profile: Name: Slayon Location: Taunican System Planet: Zebilia Height: 2m - 3m tall Skin color: Grey This type of alien come from a another galaxy located in the Taunican System. Their planet is called Zebilia and it’s ver very far away from the milky way galaxy. The planet has a an extremly cold climate. Zibilia planet has many mountains and surrounded with black crystals.

You can see they use the black crystal on their armor, because these black crystals give them extra power. These aliens are very strong and base on the black crystals they have several mystery force or power.His appearance is simalar witho our human kind, but still a bit different. He has two medium eyes which sit thightly in their sockets and can often make them appear to be evil. Their eyesight is a little bigger than the human race. They also have a small mouth and a little wide nose.

The color of their skin is greyish, strong and thick.

Slayon is like a kind of soldier in their country. He is nominated by the king of their race to 32 take the mission to search for

Slayon

another planet, because he his very brave, strong and has the courage to accomplish the mission. Therefore, the king ask him to travel far away in the space to search for planet that later they might be their home planet. The king knows one day their planet will be vanished and destroyed by a big star called “Nubia”. This big star is similar to the sun of our planet “The Earth”. It is a sperical ball of hot plasma, with internal convective motion that generates a magnetic field via a dynamo process. Nubia is approaching to Zebilia planet day by day faster and one day Nubia will destroy Zebilia.

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and on the top of the space ship there is a ring rotating around for scanning planets. If you look carefully you can see there is a door in the perspective view drawing and that is the entrance where the audience will be picked up when the spaceship approaches the audience. The audience will enter from the gate and goes through the hallway to the control room of the alien. Therefore, I need to design the hallway. because this part is where the audience will see and walk through it. Here below are 2 drawings of the hallway that I have sketched. I designed the hallway to be round like a “tube”, because that kind of shape fits the spaceship. The hallway is designed to be transparent so the audience can look the galaxy from the inside. There is also another idea that I have to make to the hallway solid with windows. The point is just to keep the audience in company by the environment of the galaxy.

In the first left drawing, I also drew a different kind of shape for the windows. Since the hallway is already round, having round windows will make the entire object too round. That’s why I choose to have another shape of windows in the hallway. Furthermore, inside of the hallway there are several guide lights like the one we have in the airplane to guide out the audience.

Concepts Here above you can see my first concept spaceship. As a designer we don’t only think about the appearance, but the size and the shape are also very important. At first I thought a designer only cares about the look and feel, but there is more to care about. Like the measurement of the object we as designer also need to design that. Take a look at the big left picture that I drew above. I have drawn a perspective view with every details and notes to specify what they are and what function do they have. The picture on the left side is the bottom view of the spaceship and the one underneath is the front view. My drawings are not drawn very well, but atleast I have tried my best what a desginer has to do.

This spaceship is a simple common spaceship that we as human are used to. The spaceship has a round shape with many small lights and it consist of a control room, hallway and 4 pods. All of these parts that I have mentioned have functions or you can say the audience will enter into those parts besides the pods. The spaceship has a control room as a core of the spaceship connected with 4 hallways and it’s surrounded by another round hallway. The control room has big transperant windows 34

As last the spaceship has 4 pods, one in each corner of the spaceship.

Why do we need 4 pods attached to the spaceship? According to the script the alien will activate some pods and it will detach from the spaceship to begin with time travel. Therefore, this spaceship I have designed it with these 4 pods attach to it. The pods detach from the spaceship by some force and will be flying middle in the air. At the end of the pod there is also a ring rotating while it’s flying in the air.

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After designing the first concept spaceship for our prototype, I continued to design more concepts. Because the first concept is too common like what we are used to and I want to come up with something totally different. The shape can be in any shape and I called it “the alien shape”. The story is about alien and it’s an alien spaceship.

That’s why I want a shape that we are not used to. In the previous page you can see several concepts of spaceship that I drew for our project.

Right in the corner is a drawing of the control room. In general it looks like the yinyang symbol, but that round thing is the hallway when the audience come up from the hallway to the control room. The door/ gate is on the floor, because that is the best way to entrance the control room without getting motion sickness with the virtual reality mode. The hallway through the control room is a not straight, but it’s more like 45o degree in position. I thought to make the door through the window, but that seems weird.

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Storyboards A storyboard is a graphic organizer in the form of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence. Here below is the first storyboard that I made for the first scene of Fermi’s Successor. The storyboard is created according to the script.

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Floorplans On the right picture is the floorplan that I created for the spaceship.

This is not a completed storyboard. This is just a small part of the storyboard of scene 03. I didn’t have enough time to create the entire storyboard, therefore the project owner asked me to create the most important part of the scene. Scene 03 is about time traveling and the most important part is when it activate the pods.

When the pods are activated they will shoot out an electric laser light straight in the middle where it connects with each other. When all of the laser lights are connected, it forms like an electric ball in the middle of 4 pods. The electric ball will become biger like it’s charging its energie then the electric ball will shoot down to the ground to start time travel.

This is also a small part of the storyboard for scene 04 “Killing human race”. In the first drawing the pods are spinning, because they are activated as a killer machine. When they are rotatting there is still a laser light connected in the center with all of the other pods. After a couple of seconds the laser light reveals something like a net in the second drawing. There are several holes in the net and it sucks up every human race. All of the human will be killed by this net “blck hole”.

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This left picture is the floorplan for the wasteland in scene 02

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This square is 100m by 100m.

Point of view is the middle point, which it’s 50m far from the edge of the square.

The alien/audience is 2m tall.

The alien/ audience view is between 45 degree to -45 degree width.

The caveman is 45 degree.

Caveman: 5m far away from the alien/audience.

Caveman: 1.5m height.

This square is 100m by 100m.

Point of view is the middle point, which it’s 50m far from the edge of the square.

The alien/audience is 2m tall.

Cave: 6m width and 3-4m height.

The cave is 25m far away from the alien/audience.

Small village will be in between 50 to -80 degrees.

The distance is 8-10m far from the alien/ audience.

The creek is -60 degree, 2m width.

House: 4m height, 3-4m width.

Mountains: 100m far from the alien/audience.

Deer: 3m far from the alien/audience.

Bob-cat: 6m far from the alien/audience.

The rock forest is 50m far from the alien/audience.

Hill at the back of the cave is 10m height.

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Moodboard

This is the moodboard for the Stone Age. There is still a forest with less big trees.

There are berries or fruit trees in the forest, so human can gather them.

Some deers are walking around and drinking water from the creek.

There is also a Bob-cat far in the forest.

These images in the moodboard also refers the idea of the Stone Age. Actions in the Stone Age:

This square is 100m by 100m.

Point of view is the middle point, which it’s 50m far from the edge of the square.

The alien/audience is 2m tall.

The alien/ audience will appear on a flat ground, there is a small huts village in front of you. You can see some villagers are inside of their house. There is a wild boar tied on a stick prepared to be grilled (there is a fire to grill). Some villagers are gathering berries and some are fishing in the creek.

The small town has a gate of 12m width and 18m height.

There is deer drinking water from the creek.

The town is 65m to 40m.

There is a wall around the town. The wall is 3m thick.

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This is the moodboard for the Ancient forest.

The forest has many big high trees. There is fog in the forest to make the mystery feeling. There will be 3 animals in the forest that the alien/audience can see.

- golden monkey drinking water from the creek; - birds singing in trees; - a sabertooth deep in the forest.

These images in the moodboard also refers the idea of the Ancient forest.

This is the moodboard for the Imperial Age. In this time period humans already have developed their skills to build houses and buildings. Below you can see the reference pictures how the Imperial Age needs to be build. There will be a town in the Imperial Age where the alien/audience will appear. The streets are very small like the picture in the moodboard. Furthermore, there are some boats sailing in the river.

Actions in the Imperial Age:

Details in the ancient forest The scene starts in a foggy ancient forest. The fog slowly fades away and the ancient forest becomes clear, but deep far away in the forest is still misty. The pods are still flying in the sky and they are connected through a laser light.

The user lands in the middle of the forest surrounded by big and tall trees while background sounds of birds and monkeys start playing. Two monkeys are coming from the back of the user swinging from tree to tree passing above the user. There is a caveman standing in a close distance in front of the user, because the appearances of the user the caveman stares at the user for a moment. The caveman slowly approaches and touches the user and then runs away. Meanwhile on the right side of the user there is a creek with clear water running over some rocks with water running sound in the background. A golden monkey is drinking water on the right side of the creek.

The user activates 4 pods flying up in the sky from the hologram to continue the next time travel. When they are activated, they are spinning in the sky while the scene is changing.

This effect and action will be the same for the upcoming next time travel period.

The scene changes by objects disappearing and new objects popping around the user.

The 4 pods slowly stop spinning around and the environment changes into the Stone 46 Age

The alien/audience will appear at the main street in the town. The mainstreet is very crowded and there are several vendors at the street. The alien/audience looks at the left side and there is a vendor staring at him then the vendor throws everything that he could get at the alien/audience and runs away fearfully.

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This is the moodboard for the last scene of the movie. The movie ends in a very nature environment with different mutated wild animals. The animals can even glow in the night and some of the plant have glow lights. It’s like a totally beautifull world, like pandora world.

This is moodboard is for scene 04 “killing humanity”. The laser of the 4pods will open up a “black hole” to suck all of the humans and kill all of them. In the moodboard there is a reference picture that we could use to imagine the “black hole”. The black hole looks like a net and will suck up every human and turn them into dust.

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Holograms

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