The Bicycle Thieves Part 1: Pre Production

So I'm gonna make a short series of posts covering our work on our trailer project this semester.

We were tasked with creating a new, 30 second trailer for the classic 40's film The Bicycle Thieves, by Vittorio de Sica. It was expected of us to change the story, setting or the genre somehow to differentiate it from the original film, but we should still be using many parts of the original as reference.

We had two weeks for pre-production where we teamed up with some animators, resulting in a team of 8 artists. After much deliberation we decided to keep much of the story intact and instead change the setting to something more fantastic, and the feeling to something akin to a Studio Ghibli film, particularly in reference to the way they convey flight. As such, the flying bicycle was born.

We decided to build a city above the clouds, keeping the father-son relationship from the film as well as the father's occupation as a poster boy.

Initially there was some discussion about what kind of sky city it would be: would it float on a flying rock? Would it be a giant fortress or some kind of magic tower? Eventually we settled for an extremely tall spire that would be separated by social class: the higher the richer.

Next stage was storyboarding, animatics and the DLO, but I'll cover that tomorrow!