Sharing the Layout

Layouts

During this week I worked with one of my team mates to figure out all of the layouts for the backgrounds we need in our animation. For this I took the first and last section to layout. It was also decided in this week that I would take on some of the backgrounds for the final animation as well, whereas before it was all going to be done by one person. The layouts were based on my storyboard backgrounds and also the script. 

All of these layouts are now to be passed on to my team mate to complete this over the following weeks as backgrounds

Ahead of schedule?

Animatic

During this week I was supposed to be working on the animatic with my team mate, however due to the efficiency my group is working at, he was able to produce the animatic in tandem with my completion of each page of the storyboard, which means we are now a week ahead of schedule and ready to start animating. 

My storyboards on the wall of the studio. 

This is the animatic my team mate produced using my storyboards, and what we will be using to time out our animation. 

That's a lot of Storyboards

Storyboards

During this week it was decided I would produce all of the storyboards based on the script that my classmate provided me with, and using the rough reference picture of a character design that my other classmate made for the animation. Story-boarding is the road I want to go down after Uni is over so I was excited to get down to it. The general theme we were going for in this animation is enclosed, dark and claustrophobic. For this reason I went with a lot of black in the background. It was my own personal choice to use traditional methods to do the storyboard, because I feel like storyboards always look better when traditionally drawn. 

Overall I was really happy with how this turned out, as it portrays the themes and character we were going for very well. 

Purgatory and Thumbnails

Purgatory

My pitch was not chosen for the group project, however it was decided that I would take on the role of director for our story about a Gnome trapped in his own purgatory, but it is found out at the end that he was being terrorized by cats in a garden the whole time. In this first week it was my role to produce some thumbnails for some of the places he was roaming around, as well as researching some places and ideas for others. We decided to make the areas very alien and not realistic so the juxtaposition of the real life garden at the end and the areas he is trapped in is clear. 

This was an example of one of the thumbnails I produced for the idea of the first forest background, I used a lot of different references for the forest backgrounds from animations which have alien planets. 

Character and Narrative Pitch

Pitch Ideas

Character and Narrative is our first module of 2nd year, for this we are required to make several ideas to pitch to the class using cubes. The class would then decide who's story in the group of 3 would be used to animate for the rest of the module. 

My Ideas 

This was my dice roll

Knight idea 1 - The "Hero"

Revolves around a hero in ancient Greece, who has many trophies for useless tasks such as "jumping 5 feet" who thinks a lot of himself for his mediocre achievements.

He is stood admiring his trophies when a woman runs into his village screaming because her son is frozen in stone. All the people turn towards the dude in armour and point to the mountain which looks incredibly gloomy and dark, at which point he starts shaking.

We next see the guy in front of the entrance to a dark entrance way which eerily creaks open. Torches light all around him on their own and reveals loads of people who are frozen in stone. The light then lights on Medusa at the end of a large hall, he gulps and runs at her sword raised, at which point her long snake tail smacks him into a wall and out of the cave.

This was the character I used for proof of concept.