Some of my concept drawings for the different "classes" of robots...

I scanned these images from a concept art book I got with the Special Edition of the game Guild Wars: Factions, entitled 'art of Guild Wars: book 2'.
This concept art, as well as being really striking and detailed, has some really strong lighting effects and it's useful to see how this is achieved with digital painting. It is relevent to our project as one of our first decisions was that our environment would be underground, or would at least have a subterrainean look. Most of these painting are of subterrainnean locations...

Tidy Monster

But enough about robotic animation...

This film by the University of Hertfordshire is very interesting to look at, specifically in terms of environment.
They have has a achieved a completely self-contained piece without using any character animation and really very little animation whatsoever. What it does use are a heavy set of post processing effects along with some very effective lighting to create an atmosphereic scene.

Real World Robotics

Choosing a Basic Structure

We had a production team meeting and made some decisions about where the film wasd going. We had the basic idea that our film was going to take place in a large factory, and that this factory wouldf be some kind of recycling plant for disused robots. Therefore most of the scene would consist of a coveyorbelt on which these robots would move along. There would be some worker robots on walkways, examining and possibly extracting data (or memories?) from the disused robots.
We thought of possible focusing in on one particualar robot, one that was diefferent to all the others, one that had different memories. These memories could be visually displayed on huge screens around that plant and we would capture the reaction of one of the worker robots when it sees the memories of this particular robot, and therefore we have the basis to form a basic plot.