Joe Caleno's Blog

This is the concept art for the purple Mindbulb. The other colour bulbs have the same design as this one, the only difference is the colour the bulb is. How does the Mindbulb work? To charge or fill up the bulb with a mind, Otto plugs the bulb into his machine like you would do with a normal lightbulb. The mind that he has selected will then begin transferring from the machine and into the bulb. When the bulb is fully charged, the green bulbs on the left and right will glow green. Then, the brain will appear in the bulb, signifying that the transaction has been completed.  

 

 At the start of the animation, Otto's lab is clean, organised and somewhat empty compared to how it ends up. The gallery is much smaller compared to the end. At the start we can see that Otto hasn't being doing his experiments for that long. We know this because all of his equipment looks brand new. As the animation goes on, we see Otto's lab getting more and more unorganised and messy. This shows us that Otto is losing his pride in the lab and is very wrapped up in his experiments. This shows us how much his work is starting to mean to him.  At the end of the animation, Otto's lab is cluttered, unorganised and dirty. It looks like a classic mad scientist lab. The gallery is much larger at the end of the animation, with the money his has earnt selling on the lightbulb idea he has expanded it. There are also a lot more lightbulbs in the gallery. 

 In my tutorial with Justin, we spoke about Otto's character and who he actually is. Otto steals people's minds because he wants to be in the most intelligent man on earth in history, but why? Maybe he questions his knowledge a lot, maybe he thinks he lacks it. We also spoke about the people Otto targets. He steals the minds of intelligent people and also people who are just generally successful. He also targets people who have a lot of charisma and are liked by the public. Otto wants to be liked by the public too however he is an introvert and is very shy and doesn't like speaking to people. Otto would rather spend his time in his lab, alone working on his inventions. We also spoke about how this character could change. At the start we see Otto's shadow. He is seen alone in his lab mumbling to himself. In the first third of the animation, Otto is quiet and doesn't like speaking to people. In the middle section, a larger amount of  people start visiting the gallery....

 This is my concept art for my main character. 

In my tutorial with Simon we discussed some new ideas. Unfortunately, I had already started my storyboard which I'll be posting in my next blog post. We discussed the atmosphere of the animation. The mad scientist really reminded me a character who would be in a 20s-30s horror film, like Nosferatu for example. I then started thinking about the lab. In my concept designs I am going to redraw the lab equipment and especially the mind stealing machine. I want most of the lab equipment to be big and bulky and almost cartoonish. The machine will look like it is made out of copper and it'll have several dents in it to help make it look older than brand new. If it looks older, people will think that the Dr. Dinkelman has stolen peoples minds before and that it is a regular thing.  I was also thinking of making the animation black and white. This will give the animation that dated feel and it will also help make the animation seem more sinister. When colour is taken away from a scene w...