Week 1, Month 2

A new challenge. Wooo!

This challenge is to create a 1-2 minute narrative animation with the program of my choice.

The idea for this narrative came to me very quickly after reading the challenge. I wanted to create a character piece with some level of interaction between at least two people. For the sake of drawing different styles of people I immediately decided that it would be a male and female.

The easy choice to make was that it would center around a romance between the two leads, but in my experience the boy meets girls story has been quite played out. So I thought about other stages of a relationship including finding love after already being with someone for some time or how one adapts to learning new things about a partner early on. What I came to though was to explore the idea of 'wooing' someone, which I feel happens at many stages of the relationship.

So my story is about a boy trying to win a girl over with presents not realising that all she wants is him.This is a very quick breakdown of what happens.

Boy brings big stack of presents to girl and gives them to her one by one.
She rejects each one kindly.
The boy goes through all his presents, each one getting bigger until he has one big present lef.
The girl rejects even the biggest present leaving the boy with nothing but empty arms.
With his arms free, the girl is finally able to hug him and show her affection.

As for visual style I am thinking i want the animation to be quite rough, maybe even incorporating alot of my working and structure lines in to the design to give a feel of being unprocessed. I idea with this would be that I can be a little bit more relaxed with the exactness of the models and animation while also giving it a unique style. But I will test it and see if it's worth doing.

I am very excited for this project the idea came to me so quickly and clearly that I feel like it's going to be fun to execute and I haven't done hand drawn animation in a long time so it will be good to practice some core skills in animation.

So I really like the narrative idea I've got. The next thing I think about is the actual visuals of the story. I want to get some interesting animation techniques in there and execute some animation staples to showcase my understanding of them. For instance I want to get a walking animation in there but perhaps do something different with it. Also want to do some character animation where you can see the change of emotion. I want to get a technical bit of animation in like a 3d head turn and also the 2 characters actually physically interacting.

Right away I conceive how these key pieces of animation fit into my narrative. I see the walk happening with the boy bringing in the presents and that can be unique and different in that he will have to balance the presents while walking. I see it being a shuffle with the feet and balancing act with the arms and back. There are plenty of moments where characters can show change of emotion, from when the girl first sees the boy, the boy's face when his first present is rejected and then changes to determination to win her over with another one. Head shakes as the girl refuses will be technical as will the hug at the end.

I've done a few drawings to get an idea of the characters. The first is a sketch of the boy carrying presents.

My aim is to keep the design relatively simple so that I can actually animated them but also flexible enough to show some of those more detailed emotions. I chose to use full large eyes (an easy disney inspiration) so that you can read the direction they are looking and register blinks and squints. It can be a very difficult thing to do with just dots for eyes and requires more style in its execution. Also lots of area for the mouth, for similar reasons. Going for full five fingers for some of the articulate gestures that I have in mind but the the rest is generic body. A simple shirt and pants combo so that my time is spent getting the animation right and not trying to keep on model so much.

The next piece I did as a sort of target render, what I hope the final piece can look like.

In this one I really wanted to try and achieve a balance between finished line work and a sketchy kind of aesthetic. Even from the first drawing I tried to refine the character design already, giving the boy a cleaner hairstyle so that some of the expressions can be read easier. With the girl I'm going for a simple elegant look. I imagine her to be in a dress with and easy to draw hairstyle. The dress is just an effective signifier of gender which will help tell the characters apart. It also helps show femininity in the character while not being overtly sexual. I want her look pretty but not unobtainable. It also has the benefit of being simple to draw but can be used effectively to show movement with secondary action.

I'm working on storyboarding the scenes out which will then become the basis for my keyframes. The idea with this will be to make sure I hit the major plot points and illustrate the major animation moments that I intend to include.