This trimester I’ve begun pre-production for my final project with a small team of two other animation students; Isabel Fernandez and Josiah O’Keeffe. I have been working as Art Director and have spent a considerable amount of time on the concept stages of this project so I thought I’d share my progress to date.
At the beginning of the project our team had a very vague idea about what we wanted. Our initial idea involved a magical forest, an elf character and a chase scene. We felt that this wasn’t very original but we weren’t sure which direction to take it, so we started concept art to try and get some ideas from the character. Below are my character concepts, I tried a variety of designs in search of something to fit the story and environment while also being original.
The last three characters I did inspired by a colour scheme I picked before I even began drawing them. Our group decided on the first character in the picture above. We changed our environment to be a magical forest with a blue/purple colour scheme so she would fit it well. Our character also became a thief with questionable morals so the darker theme went with her mysterious and dishonest demeanor. Our short also became a comedy so it called for a more stylized character.
To try and get a further sense of this characters personality and movement style I did some quick sketches of her in action.
We brought all of this to our first pitch along with some quick storyboards I sketched out to get an idea of action and characters.
After our pitch we got a lot of very useful feedback in regards to our story and character design. Mainly it needed to be more well defined. To lessen the work for animating we as a group decided the character should have very tight fitting clothes so there is no need to animate cloth. This was a bit of a challenge to keep the appeal of the design whilst removing what wasn’t necessary. This is the design I ended up with and our group has finalized, and I was extremely happy with how it turned out.
Furthermore some new storyboards where required which incorporated all the changes we where suggested to make and overall just looked nicer. Below are the ones I completed and took to our next pitch.
From this we received more criticism which our group took into account before planning our animatic. I drew all the panels for the animatic and worked with my team mate Josiah to animate them. Below is the link to the result and our progress so far on the story!
Brooke Willis 