Animatic Awakening 2

Yesterday, I showed you the first few stills of the "awakening" scene from the never-released book trailer for Rome's Evolution. A little bit past yesterday's stills, we see the world clearly as Rei's eyes are, in theory, wide open and he is fully conscious.

Today we continue with two more stills from the opening. Here is the first:



Do you recognize the silhouette? Obviously it is meant to be Rome but there is something much subtler going on here. You may recall when I first started this adventure, I wanted the actress Kelly Brook to play Rome. When I first saw her, she was only 25 years old and played Victoria Hardwick on the TV show Smallville. However, inevitably, she has aged and is now 37 years old, too old to play Rome. I figured by the time I get these books made into a Netflix series, Kelly will be just old enough to play Binoda, Rome's mother. It would be stunt casting that nobody would even understand. But even so, the silhouette is inspired by her.

In the next frame, we get an appearance by none other than MINIMCOM himself:



This is the first time I ever "saw" MINIMCOM in real life. Bruce took my description of the livetar and rendered it into the trailer. It was pretty cool. The only odd thing was the light shining through his eye slits and mouth slit. Again, this is Bruce taking editorial license. If MINIMCOM is all black and the back of his head blocked the light, you would not be able to see these features. So while silly, it is rather effective in making these details observable.