Fantastic Voyage; Creatures and Environment

Here is my progress on Fantastic Voyage, as of 20/03/19. I've hopefully near sorted some creature and environment designs, and want to move on to scripting/storyboarding over the next few days, provided there's no major re-adjustments to be made. Explanations for each image below.

In my attempt to build a microcosm through which to explain evolution from the ground up, I took inspiration from the videos Phil pointed me to, and researched constructivism and suprematism. At first I was imagining creating my world in 2D, simmilar to the videos, however I decided that this would not be the best idea, since I couldn't imagine how my creatures could exist and evolve intuitively in a 2D world, so I decided to transfer the simple shapes and bold colours to a 3D design instead.

My creatures above are currently unnamed. They are simple, purely conceptual 'light creatures' that are somewhat like light bulbs, in that their bodies are made up of simple shapes made from a delicate glass like material, which contains a mysterious glowing substance, presumed to be the essence of their being. In a similar manner to how mammals seek out warmth, these creatures live off of light, and must constantly consume it in order to stay alive, and reproduce. If their inner light goes out, they die. 

Even with simple features, these creatures are born in a variety of different shapes and sizes, the main factors being the proportions of each of the blocks that make up their bodies. It's also possible for a creature to have more than two blocks, as per the last example, which is an important factor in how these creatures evolve to be more complex.

For 'character designs' these creatures are practically as simple as you can go, but there's a good reason for this. Complex animals that exist in the real world have unfathomably complex bodies, and literally millions of different interconnected traits. I wanted to design creatures simple enough that they would have no more than a handful of traits, and you could see them very clearly all at once through the distinct makeup of their bodies.

Another important factor that drove me towards these specific designs was the idea that it was more important than ever that my creatures and world ran on a solid foundation of rules. What I mean by that, is that it should be plainly obvious to the viewer what can and can't happen in my world, and the limits of what my creatures can and can't do, without having to explain it.

For example, originally I imagined my creatures having a jelly-like consistency, and bending/flexing to move around. However, this is problematic, because it introduces huge uncertainty around what the limits are of how a creature can move. In the image above, it's difficult to say whether the middle creature is highly developed, or simplistic, because you don't know for sure whether it can move with the speed and agility of a worm, or a tiger.

I switched to the ball/joint system because it creates a real sense of physicality in my creatures. When you imagine that the creature on the right is made up of rigid glass blocks and ball joints, you immediately have a much better sense of how this creature might move around, and the limitations of it's physique. This is important, because Natural Selection is all about small margins of advantage/disadvantage in a creatures abilities, and just having a bunch of differently proportioned squishy jelly creatures that seem to move however they want, would make it more difficult to see thes small differences between any two creatures at a glance.

My creatures move in the most efficient way they can achieve with the bodies they were born into. In real life, behavioural evolution is a whole other area where creatures evolve behaviours; in other words, two creatures with similar bodies could have advantages/disadvantages from each-other, based on the way they used said bodies. For this demonstration, I'm ignoring this. Since my whole concept is about showing Natural Selection visually, introducing a psychological element would go against the whole point, and I don't think leaving it out would make my explanation 'wrong', I'm just isolating one aspect of Natural Selection from another. 

So, it's assumed that as soon as my creatures are born, they know how to utilise their bodies in the most efficient way possible. This means that their only limiting factor is their physiology. However, there are creatures that can definitely draw the short straw in that respect, and the most efficient way possible to use their bodies may very well just be terrible; i.e. extreme example; if a creature is born as just a head with no body (which can happen in my system), they are generally 'screwed', no matter how desperately they will themselves to move 

Again, in the natural world, there are lots of things motivating and controlling animals. But in my world, there are only two; food and sex. As my creatures move around and use up their internal light source, it will slowly fade over time. Unless they consume a new light source every few minutes, their internal light will go out, and they will die. They are also drawn towards other creatures, as long as they are different from the one they've just mated with (although light likely takes priority when they're getting dim)

My creatures can die of starvation, but also trauma. Their bodies are extremely delicate, and it only takes a very small amount of force for them to shatter, spilling their essence; even a small fall will do it. This means that the environment becomes extremely hazardous to my creatures, since any terrain they're not equipped to cope with could be deadly.

This is my genetic analogy for my creatures. It's an analogy because, obviously, it's massively simplified. It's basically just the end ratios of each block laid out in a long string, with a system for denoting multiple block chains from one ball-joint. Each one represents a gene, which I've dubbed 'zienes', since they are only a very very basic analogy for genetics. There's a separate section in the GCSE syllabus about genetics, so if I'm going to use this, it likely only has to cover what's relevant to Natural Selection, (but not contradict or give false information).

I have a genetics system because, as I mentioned, it's important to me that my world works on an internal, integeral set of rules, and I think sticking as closely as possible to these rules will help me demonstrate how evolution is fundamentally a mindless, statistical process; not someone just designing things. If I have a starting creature; A, and later I show how it might evolve into B, I like to think that it should actually be possible for creature A to evolve into creature B, through a conceivable path using this system. Otherwise it just feels a bit like cheating; again, if I'm trying to show people evolution working, intelligently designing a start and end point separately would kind of defeat the point.

For instance, take the charming and much beloved creature H11BC13BC33BaC12BC22bC12BC22cC12BC22⁹ , pictured in the top right. If I wanted this to be a potential example of a much more developed creature, I would be able to show that it's possible, through my ruleset, for a more simple creature to develop into this one, purely through mutation and inheritance, thus helping prove my point that Natural Selection happens without intelligent input.

It's important to note that I don't know if I'll even feature this in the animation, especially if people think it would lead to confusion for viewers. At most, it will probably just appear briefly in a few second shot about creatures mating. Otherwise, it's just there to help me plan out how my creatures will look/change and relate to one another.

This is here because I know it's a gripe that always seems to get mentioned by biology teachers, so it's probably important to make some kind of reference to it in the animation. Evolution doesn't happen in straight lines; it's based off common ancestors, and branches out wildly and doesn't always appear make sense chronologically; species diverge and meet dead ends, older species outlive more recent ones, and simpler creatures don't necessarily die off as newer ones turn up. Using my model, I could definitely show some kind of tree like this near the end to show how the creature we followed isn't the whole story. However, it's not worth dedicating too much time on this, since it's covered in more depth in the speciation part of the course, if I remember correctly.

I've also kept my environments simple; they're by no means stunning, but they are incredibly important, as they are what will ultimately shape my creatures destiny. In order to focus in on one aspect of Natural Selection, I've decided on how creatures are selected by terrain, which is why I've designed my creatures to die when they fall over; it means that they have to become well adapted to their surroundings. 

The idea is to have terrain that encourages the development of certain traits; such as rough terrain (shown above) encouraging the selection of creatures with lower centres of gravity, and wider bases (although, as I've also shown, this can only go so far, because the creature on the top right would be very stable, but also only able to move slowly because of its tiny hops, which puts it at low risk of trauma, but high risk of starvation.).

Different terrain, such as a cavernous environment, would encourage smaller creatures that could fit in the gaps, steep terrain would favour those with greater flexibility (to better control their centre of mass), and flat terrain would likely select for raw speed; remember that the creatures are constantly competing with each-other to reach the capsules first, especially in population dense areas. I could even make the giraffe analogy by creating an environment where larger amounts of light-capsules spawn higher and higher above the creatures heads.

None of the environments will have difficult terrain in the starting area, however as the terrain moves out, it will become increasingly perilous. However, with a limited amount of light-capsules available, there's high competition in the safe areas, so there's plenty of incentive to venture out into the danger to secure a less busy hunting ground (light capsules 'spawn' randomly), and creatures will likely be forced to anyway as they begin to starve.

I thought about having just one environment that branches out from a flat centre point, to many different terrain types. The creatures that best suited these different terrain types would likely be quick to inhabit them, and you would see the creatures becoming more and more specialised, generation by generation as they ventured out into their respective zones as demand for food increased with population growth. This could be a neat analogy for speciation, however, I think that might be pushing things a bit, if I'm not already.

An influence map focusing on Constructivism and Suprematism. My environments are not perfectly represented by my concept art, but what I have in mind is heavily influenced by the bottom row sculptures, and the tan/brown-ish painting in the middle of the far left column.

It's likely that some people at this point might be completely lost as to how I'm planning to turn this into a short; I'll admit that most of this has been world building. However, I firmly believe that now I have this comprehensive microcosm, I can relativity easily write my script and story-board without having to worry too much about what I'm going to use to show/explain something, since it's, in theory, already here. I just need to arrange what I have into an order that will flow nicely and be comprehensible in a few minutes of animation.

The overviews of each segment will likely be very brief, and I probably won't even verbally cover most of what I've talked about here, I can cut out huge swathes of the dialogue if need be. But I'm actually not to worried about jam-packing the narrative with information. The idea is that, if the shots are rich enough, and I can get everything in there in some form, even just for a few seconds, it could be the type of resource the teacher runs back through and makes references to; pausing it at different parts to point out just a small detail that can generate a larger discussion.
That's my philosophy here; if the visual information is dense enough, it shouldn't matter if the dialogue is an overview, there's plenty there for the teacher to expand on at their discretion.

I imagine my narrator will take on the personality of a cold, calculating lab-assistant robot (à la 'GLaDOS'), talking you through the process of natural selection, using footage from various instances of this 'experement'/'simulation' (which can run through countless generations very quickly.) I like the idea of the cold robot, because of how it contrasts with the cute, helpless creatures, who somehow look like they are, just, in constant suffering. I feel like this lends itself to some cliche, but still funny heartless robot gags, of which the creatures would fall victim to frequently.

I feel like I'd like the tone of the animation to be a somewhat dark/deadpan comedy; I don't think this would be too dark for an audience of ~14 yr olds, and to be honest, considering the brutal reality of Natural Selection, I feel like you'd be stretched to find a narrative that framed it as a particularly wholesome subject.