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.

Hidden stories (I'm not great at naming things)

So It's the Christmas holidays huh?
I should enjoy my time off you say?

NAH! Being the busy bee I am, I have been taking full advantage of living in Edinburgh, for this terms arcing project : "Hidden Stories", in which our animations have to be influenced by an object from one of the Edinburgh museums, of which I have visited most of by this point in my holidays. Haha!

So I thought a quick update could be quite nice. I have so far visited the childhood museum and the people's story museum. Hopefully by tomorrow I'll have done the Edinburgh museum and the writer's museum.
 In addition I have seen most of the monuments in Edinburgh as I live here.

I really need to stop talking now. Just look at the stuff I've done already! :D

They're in ranking order from my least favourite to my favourite. No offence art works... I feel bad now... I take it back!

the animatic

I should mention I storyboarded and made an animatic before turning my attention to my character. So here are they!

I'm really pleased with the progression since then actually. I no longer have the cat. I changed some angles, I developed a general style of close and tight angles for the entire thing and I made it less tacky whiles still making it more christmasy, which aint easy baby.

To prove that I didn't just make all that up here is my animatic from the last time I updated it:

Told you. So since here I have taken the door out and replaced it with a scene where he carves his pumpkin and places a tea light in it. I wanted context to begin with but doors always seem to imply movement and because their wasn't any it became an irrelevant scene. In addition I squabbled with myself about the religious connotations of the tree but decided to leave it in there. And lastly I decided to include one wide panning shot of the neighbourhood just after the character leaves and realises it's Christmas just to give people a chance to absorb the actual Christmas message of the card.