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.

The character

This is my initial character design sheet for the Christmas card. The first design I decided to throw away because I didn't think I wanted my character to be too young as young people would know what holiday it was. So I thought I wanted to make him an older, independent character who would have so much going on that he might not necessarily realise what point in the year it was. I t also allows me to incorporate the idea that consumers have Christmas forced upon them the second Halloween is over. Which I believe is one of the reasons  dislike Christmas. I amn't allowed to become excited about it in my own time. It is forced on me by advertising, Christmas specials in November, The German market in the centre of Edinburgh. It's inescapable! Erm sorry. Anyway that's why not him. At one point I was getting sick of trying to come up with a mature and independent character that appeared to be mildly dressed in a Halloween costume, so I decided to really go for it and Twinkie man was born. That was a sad day for me. The day my character looked the best dressed like a Twinkie. Next I thought maybe I should play around with a normal male, short back and sides appearance but with a twist on a Christmas jumper so I didn't have to work to hard on his shape. It just didn't feel right. So I thought maybe I should make him not give a shit but no that sent the wrong messade. Then finally I got it. He could be naturally orientated towards Halloween then he would appear just the right amount of Halloween although easily translatable to Christmas. Bingo!

So in developing my Christmas card. I decided I wanted some way to unify the entire cartoon from holiday to holiday but retain the shock of his realisation that in fact it is Christmas and not Halloween. I thought about doing the entire thing in just shades of blue, hence the blue shading above.

But it was pointed out to me that the shock of him walking into Christmas might be lost and I definitely don't want that. So then I thought two colours. Red and blue! It's so obvious now!
So here's where I went from there!

And basically I love it!

So to explain my process before I show you my finished piece, I began this work by drawing the ball and the backgrounds and filming it using the Take 5. I then took these layers into After Effects and composited them and finally added colour to each individual frame (not before fighting with myself about whether I thought Orange or red would be a better colour) then rendering the finished piece.

So here it is-

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.

Bouncy Bouncy Part 2 - Ideas

The next stage to bouncy bouncy was to pick two materials that would significantly alter the trajectory of the bounce. When I started to investigate my options my first thought was what constitutes a significant change. I decided that a good change would be if it bounced lower or higher. Firstly I looked at lower.

I decided that heavier objects such as metal ball-bearings or solid plastics would bounce much lower so would lighter objects without much substance such as balls of paper or hairballs. I also decided wood wouldn't bounce much but I believe it would have bounced a bit more than these materials based on the kind of wood. 

 Then I began to think about other possibilities aside from weight such as gravitational pull, a different bounce trajectory and natural objects.

I liked the idea of the moon impacting in the ground however I felt that it didn't meet the expectations set in the project brief. It didn't bounce, it just hit the ground at great speed. I considered a pom pom because when I dropped one it very often bounced backwards. Which I thought was a clever idea but if that was the only difference then I wasn't demonstrating any skill. Finally I decided I liked the idea of the orange as there was a lot I could play about with. 

In addition I decided I liked the bouncy ball idea as it would bounce much higher and closer together than an ordinary bouncy ball.