Category: FMP

Character: The Programmer

With the story and tone established, I moved on to developing the characters, beginning with the programmer. I sourced the base mesh from TurboSquid because it came with a functional rig and realistic proportions, which aligned with the grounded, clinical sci-fi tone of the film.

However, I didn’t want her to remain a generic readymade asset. I re-textured the skin entirely on my own, focusing on subsurface scattering, natural lip colour, eyebrow definition, pore detail, and overall roughness values. These adjustments were essential for making her hold up under the harsh, cool-toned laboratory lighting I planned to use.

Before designing her final outfit, I made sure the base skin looked convincing enough to carry close-up moments. I always intended to place her in a tight sci-fi bodysuit later, but the foundation needed to feel believable first. It helped to test the textures directly in Maya under lighting setups similar to the final scene, allowing me to adjust tones and detail in real time.

Clothing and Material Development

For the outfit, I turned to Marvelous Designer because I wanted the garment to sit naturally on the character’s body rather than feeling painted or simulated directly onto the mesh. I followed a tutorial focusing on bodysuit construction and also consulted a friend with a fashion design background, who helped me understand the pattern-making logic needed to achieve the sleek, functional silhouette I imagined.

Once the simulated garment was final, I imported it into Substance Painter to refine the material qualities. My goal was to create a fabric that sat somewhere between synthetic textile and lab-grade technical gear.

Mecha Design and Modelling

The robot required a completely different approach because I built it entirely from scratch. Early on, I knew I wanted a mech rather than a humanoid robot. Humanoid forms felt too expressive and didn’t fit the cold, engineered aesthetic of the narrative. A heavier, industrial machine supported both the tone and the world-building more effectively, especially given the lab-military hybrid environment I was creating.

I gathered a reference board that included silhouettes and designs from existing mech designs. These references guided the overall shape language. I wanted the mech to appear constructed from interlocking plates and segmented hardware, rather than smooth, organic curves.

Building the Mech: Structure and Complexity

Modelling the mech was a long, layered process. I constructed it in separate components to ensure every joint made structural sense. Each limb, hinge, and rotating part had to look functional, as though it could exist in a working industrial machine. Understanding how two parts would logically connect was one of the biggest challenges. I tested multiple variations for each joint before finding combinations that appeared both strong and mechanically feasible. I initially had a torso that could entirely rotate on the x axis. But later, with newer parts and to make it visually less boxy, I had to change the torso which could not rotate anymore.

As the design grew more complex, the file became extremely heavy, but working component-by-component made it manageable. The segmented approach also helped maintain the industrial authenticity I aimed for, since each piece could be treated as an engineered unit instead of a decorative add-on. By the end, the mech felt like a constructed object with weight, purpose, and believable articulation—exactly the contrast I needed against the softness and humanity of the programmer.

The idea for my film began after I took part in a panel discussion about AI in design and art practices. It wasn’t anything dramatic, but the conversation stayed with me. It made me think about how fast AI is moving into creative spaces and how we don’t even fully understand its scope yet. I kept thinking about authorship, and how AI pulls from artists’ work and presents it as its own. That made me wonder about imitation, emotion, and at what point a machine can start mimicking more than just style. That became the core question for me: if a machine can understand patterns well enough to copy us, can it eventually learn how to disobey?

After that, I made a very rough mind map. It wasn’t neat or structured, but it helped me see what parts of the topic were actually interesting to me. I explored themes like AI in creativity, AI versus human, who gets credit for creative work, and whether machines can develop a sense of autonomy. Slowly, the sections that dealt with control and breakdown of control started standing out as the strongest direction.

Once I had that clarity, I began developing actual story ideas. I ended up with two concepts that had the same theme but very different settings. The first idea was a war narrative about a military robot falling from the sky at the end of a battle. As it starts shutting down, it hums a broken version of a song its programmer used to sing while working on it. It was emotional and symbolic, but visually it didn’t feel as strong.

The second idea, which I eventually chose, took place in a futuristic robotics lab. A programmer works late at night on her assigned robot when her screen suddenly glitches and shows Manual Override. The robot’s lights turn red, and before she can reach the emergency button, it predicts her movement and kills her. One by one, the other robots in the lab activate and begin marching in perfect synchronisation. Choosing this version felt clear to me because visually it was much more grounded. I wanted to build a mech, and a controlled lab setting made that possible in a way the war concept didn’t. The environment was a major factor in the decision.

Before moving forward, I roughly storyboarded these ideas just to see them on paper. The hardest moment to figure out was how to show the override happening, and I eventually realised that lighting would play the biggest role in communicating that shift. After a few iterations, the flow of the story became much clearer, and it started feeling like something I could actually produce.

Once I had the main idea locked in, I moved on to creating a previs in Maya to understand how the whole sequence would actually play out. I knew the animation depended a lot on timing, camera flow, and how the audience would read the moment the override happens, so doing a rough block-out felt essential. I kept everything super simple by animating just a few poses in blocking, gathering some assets from Sketchfab to Maya to blockout the areas and animate better. Seeing the shots next to each other helped me realise which moments needed more tension, which ones felt too slow, and where I should cut earlier.

Working on the previs also gave me a clearer sense of how to place the cameras later. I experimented with different angles to see what made the lab feel more isolating and what best captured the shift in control when the mech starts overriding her commands. Even in this early stage, it helped me decide the emotional beats: when the viewer should feel calm, when the suspicion starts building, and when the shock hits. Having this rough roadmap made the next stages much smoother because I wasn’t guessing — I already understood the visual flow from start to finish.