The style

Ok so this is a post to explain why I picked the style for this animation I did and what references I'm going to use in the making of my animation.

So a while back I picked a character and tried him out in several different styles and now I'd like to explain my thinking behind my final decision.

So here are my original character style ideas. The first is a lilo and stitch watercolour and pencil inspired character.

However once I'd painted him in adding pencil colour didn't really improve the design. He still felt a little bit flat and uninspired. Which was unfortunate as I liked this idea and although I got the idea from an animation set in a warm climate with lots of vegetation I felt it would translate nicely to a cityscape in winter.

My nest design is actually based on the work of my best friend Kirsty Oxley, an illustration student at the college.

Kirsty's fond of a watercoloured design with thin black cross-hatching detail. I've always liked seeing her work and thought I'd try it out as well but I can't get my cross-hatching thin enough and my character looks to blocky with his cross hatching. I thought about buying a thinner pen and trying again but I then thought it actually had the wrong kind of feel for this story. Although this works nicely with Kirsty's rustic, slightly scary representation of Tam 'o shanter, it doesn't work with a lighter, modern representation of a story about pigeons. It has a kind of old fashioned feel to it that doesn't fit with my animation.

Now the last I like. It's based on another soft, wintertime story. The snowman.

Now where as when animating the snowman each cell was coloured in separately, my animation shall just have coloured in characters in this style. I like it because it feels soft and light and has a light-hearted feel which would be in-keeping with the rest of the story. I also thought against the other characters he felt the best rounded. His shadows were better and he felt more 3D than the rest of the designs. For a little while I was worried he would disappear under the rostrum but I tried it and I could see him fine and so could Dragon Frame. Which was brilliant because I knew this was the design I wanted to go ahead with.

When Balls Go Bad - Development

Carrying on my development of the when balls go bad project. I began to design the tree's in my animation and also the way in which the colour bled from the orange.

My trees were influenced by Dr. Seuss's truffula trees.

and my decision to make the orange puddles appear more like paint splatters than just orange puddles comes from Sega's The Unfinished Swan.

Where the whole environment is revealed through paint splatters. I liked this concept and enjoy the idea of my vision slowly being revealed as the ball bounces through the scene.

In addition to using these ideas as references I also looked at this:

(Please not that since I used this as a reference [accessed 16/10/13] the video has been edited so it no longer shows the segment of the video I considered, apologies.) 

The latter part of this video, mime for a change, involves bubbles colouring in the town after all the colour is removed from it. This is another idea that influenced my decision making regarding the aesthetics of my animation. I decided that that crude a colouring method wasn't something I would strive for but rather strive for a more coherent seeping of colour.

I have decided to hand draw the background and motion of the ball then I will input it into Photoshop or after effects to add the layers of colour. I thought this would be symbolic of two aspects of modernism which I could then include in my defence of my project. The hand drawn part speaks of the truth to materials that modernist found valuable in there work as a hand drawn animation you can see exactly what was done, nothing's hidden. Then the digital application of the colour relates to modernist use of technology. As it allows me to play around with the speed at which I allow the colour to seep and also the vibrancy of the colour itself.

Lastly to aid in the construction of this animation (and because my brain is an organisational mess and needs all the help it can get) I created myself a little time table/ check list to follow through the completion of the project:

I separated the project out into movements, backgrounds and colour development, then proceeded to layer them over each other so I knew exactly what stage which part happens at. This way I should be able to track my progress and keep a close eye on my time across the remaining two weeks.

When Balls Go Bad 2

My next idea was that it could fall off a tree.

 This felt natural and like the orange would bounce better. It would drop from higher and allow me to do a lot more with the movement. So then I began to think about what it could do. I struggled with ideas for quite some time until I was looking through "The Dictionary of Imaginary Places" By Alberto Manguel and discovered an all white island. This concept intrigued me as I had already decided the orange's colour was important in this animation. I had already considered what the orange might do in an environment that suited it but now I was thinking about what it would do if it found itself in an environment that  didn't suit it.

I began thinking about how I could use the orange's colour to help me impact the environment or vies versa. I decided that having the orange change into something else could be an interesting concept and began to think about how the inhabitance of the island would act if suddenly faced with colour.

Using the idea of modernism and truth to materials. (which is already true of an orange.) I thought that the inhabitance could try to use the orange for many other things. Stop lights, paint or jewellery but the orange would always just be an orange. 

Then it occurred to me that this wasn't using any of the principles I was trying to show in this work. The ball would not actually bouncing or obviously effecting the environment. At a stretch I could say that it was a societal impact but that would really be pushing it. 

So moving on from that I began to think about a slightly more direct approach. I knew already that a simple black and white background would symbolise modernism as they removed a lot of ornamentation and decoration from their designs.

I developed an island that I thought might look like this. Then I thought to myself "You know that's quite sad" and from this my mind related this simple lifeless environment to the state of Europe at the birth of modernism. I thought I would then use the concept of utopia that the modernist strived for to inspire my animation. 

From this I developed an idea where the ball would be the only coloured object around but as it bounced it would bring colour and life to its surroundings. 

I then prepared a storyboard to help me visualise my ideas and began working.

When Balls Go Bad

So for our next project we're putting the balls from bouncy bouncy into an environment. Either the ball or the environment have to be effected in the animation and we need to use everything we've learnt so far. So from bouncy bouncy I decided myself that I would work on the way my animations finished as I was told that when the ball came to a stop it didn't feel natural and also my spacing as it was generally felt that in some places the ball sped up when it shouldn't or bounced to high where it wouldn't. In this project I hope to work on these aspects to get a smoother running animation.

So I decided to chose my orange to per-sue into this project. The aspects I am taking from that project forward is the strong element of colour and the black line round the outside.

So when I began thinking first about where I would usually find an orange. So my first thoughts were:

In a kitchen.

For this concept I kept in mind that Jared had asked us to think about cause and effect and I began thinking about this animation:

As it's set in a kitchen it came to my mind very quickly when I thought about how my ball could move in a kitchen. I thought about this freezing idea and on a tangent I came up with an idea.

I thought that the orange could bounce out the bowl or roll out a bag, then roll over the switch on the kettle, setting it off. Following this the condensation would cause the room to dampen. From here I thought it could bounce of the freezer door opening it and freezing the condensation into sheets of ice. Lastly I wanted the ball to bounce off the washing machine causing it to start and then shake the ground and make ice cubes.

Our ideas had to be influenced by something we were doing in first year outside of studio work, which actually left us with very little options. I decided to relate my animations to modernism and this is why I picked a kitchen. The modernist designed the basic idea for the contemporary kitchen after measuring how much time is wasted in a woman's day by the old design. They made kitchens efficient and this was an idea I thought about playing with. 

However in the end I decided to disregard this idea as I thought it didn't have enough focus on the ball and would be more work than I had time for.