Inspiration

Last christmas me and friends hang out when we pass through the Waterloo station, I noticed some people take a travel bag and smoke outside. I quickly thought about this kind of person they are usually drifting outside and do not return home for many years. They might want to return to their hometown after many years to visit the people and things they know. But things are often not as they should be, and he will return home to find that everything he knew is gone. So I wanted to create a story like this to tell people to cherish the present moment.

Another important fact for this tiny story cause I was born in Chongqing near three gorges, the government was planning to build the Three Gorges Dam in the 1990s, so they had to move all the people out of the area. Many people have since left this land and gone thousands of miles away never to return. Many people want to come back and visit again when they find that their hometown is gone and their neighbors are scattered across the country. These things happened all around where I grew up, and I watched them happen. So that’s another reason why I wanted to go for this inspiration. By the way Jia Zhangke made a film about this thing in this area Still Life (2006) he provided a more complete story about this.

Story Setting

Cause I now stay in the UK, so I wanna this story happened in this country. And recently I’m really into the Peaky Blinder so I probably make the character like Tommy Shelby or others in this series. Besides it could happened in the old times maybe the early of 20th centry. And the location should take place near the train station in the village area, these places are low income, most people are willing to run outside to earn a living, which is more in line with the setting of the story.

So I have a story brief: One Christmas in the early 1900s, a man with a suitcase was waiting for a train at a country train station. The train was coming in, and the man was smoking and looking off into the distance, recalling the stories he had been telling along the way.

Technique Challenge

This time I notice a new work flow that could merge Maya prodution method with Unreal Engine the USD work flow. USD file can save all the scene as a cache people could swich to every 3D software such like 3D MAX and C4D and of course Unreal Engine, and all the changes will be updated by this file so there is no worry about different software’s limitation. I would follow the Epic offcial guidline video to make this story by the way test the new USD work flow, I believe it will be more efficient so I can use in my FMP!