Inspirations for this Project

As this is all going to be hand made, and nothing will be 'off the shelf' (like props would likely be in a live action short film), everything has to be explicitly designed and created with purpose. For this film, I had gone through many different ideas and story concepts, ranging from aliens dropping robots form the sky to huge robots invading and discovering their emotions, but in the end all of these ideas fell sort on one thing; they don't really have anything unique about them. They are all fairly generic ideas that don't allow for much creative freedom, and have been done a thousand times in different sci-fi media.

While the idea that I have settled on has likely been done before, I like it and think it fits well with the characters that have been thought about. The idea of the robots being incredibly small was inspired by a film that released earlier this year, Ant-man. I loved the way that the cinematography conveyed size and how everything was represented and shown from a smaller perspective, as well as they way that normal everyday objects take on a new meaning when seen from a smaller angle, for instance when a tap turning on is shown as being similar to a tsunami. or when small distances are gigantic chasms.

This idea of scale is a central point in the story I have written; the small group of robots, our protagonists, are looking for any items of value to them that can give them energy, as they have nearly run out. when one of them comes across an enormous power canister (a Duracell AA battery) easily 5 times the size of any of them, they are ecstatic at their discovery. this is all about the relative perspective, as to us the battery is tiny and can't keep a torch on for longer then 5 minutes without running out, to them it is huge and contains vast amounts of power that they so desperately need, and will keep them going for years. This sense of scale is what I will try to convey throughout my short film.

The designs of the robots themselves have been inspired by multiple different works of science fiction, ranging from newer entries to the genre such as Wall-E to older more classic designs like Daleks. I have even looked at some designs from other forms of medias such as the characters of Wheatly and GLaDOS from Portal or E-102 Gamma. As these inspirations are heavily CGI-based, it has helped massively when designing methods of them conveying emotions and expressions, as seeing how professionals have created workarounds for them is interesting to discover. For instance, in almost every scene involving Wall-E, there is a shot of him bending in a way in which physically doesn't make sense. This has showed me that as long as it is designed properly and disguised well, the rules of weather these robots could physically exist and work as they do are bendable to an extent. This allowed me more creative freedom when designing my characters.