During our introductory lecture to Design & Pre-Production for Animation 2, we had 3 students from Film to brief us on the project that they are developing for their third year, called, Curiosity. It is about a little girl that finds a dusty and forgotten robot in a warehouse. The team wanted us to create and come up with robot designs that will fit with their story. It must have a screen for a face and also have the style of a humanoid robot due to the fact that the team will be using Mo-Cap for this project.

They mentioned that the designed robot must have all 4 limbs attached as they will be using Mo-Cap. The more I worked on the design, the more I wondered about the 4 limb requirement. We were briefed about the technology, Mo-Cap, before... and couldn't a chosen limb be switched off or deactivated? Nevertheless, they are our clients and it would be best if we just followed what they wanted anyway.

The humanoid-ish robot design that I went for was a deep-sea robot. The backstory of this robot is it was created by scientists to allow them to discover new life that is in the deep sea, instead of sacrificing mankind's life to head down to the darkest parts of the unknown. This robot was dumped in the warehouse due to it being replaced by an updated version of itself that can collect more samples and dive even deeper (life is sad when you get replaced by hip, young, new, fresher versions).

The other robot design was inspired by Chinese New Year. I hosted a CNY dinner this year (TMI, but... it adds to the story), and amongst the food that was served was the glorious and heavenly dim-sum. And I thought to myself, why can't there be a robot that steams up dim-sum and serves it to you almost instantly upon request? So, I designed it. The main body is inspired by the bamboo baskets that dim-sum are normally steamed in, alongside with the legs which are inspired by the traditional outfits that lion-dancers wear.



**P.S.: Peter Lord came and gave us a talk on the 16th of Feb... Are we blessed or are we blessed? I'll probably do a post on it soon and what inspiration the great Mr Lord has given me. Check it out on the FalAnimation & VFX Blog <here>!