During the Character design phase of our project I was not involved directly as I had chosen to do a different job within the task. However I feel that it is important to show off the characters which were created and to give credit to my group mates were it is due. I think the character designs are great and I will show them all below along with the animatics.
Character Development
To the left I have included Bens initial design for Little boot. As you can see from the beginning Ben had a very clear idea of what he though the character should look like and he kept this throughout. I really like the expressions he used on the face, it conveys a lot of emotion.
Ben also did a character sketch for Little Boots dad Klint. I think this design has really good shape language and the characters personality is portrayed extremely well in how blocky he is. I believe an inspiration for this design is the dad from cloudy with a change of meatballs, hence the bushy eyebrow and no eyes. Klint looks terrifying and extremely strict, which are all the character qualities we want to be portrayed by him in the animation.
Claire then did a design of small fry the dragon. I think this is a really interesting sketch by Claire because the way she coloured it makes him look like he has a glow of bioluminescence which we had discussed. overall I think its a great sketch and is a good base to work from.
Claire also did up a design for Gruff, the Sheriffs pet dragon. Gruff is supposed to be everything Klint is but in dragon form. Blocky and menacing in look and I think Claire's design shows exactly this. He looks like he would walk really slow and is just a dragon you want to avoid completely, which is what we needed.
As you can see from the sketches Ben and Claire did there designs in different art style. Because we liked both the designs they had made we decided as a group that it would be best if Ben took Claire's designs and went over them in the Samurai Jack art style so that we could have one cohesive art style throughout our animation. I think the new designs look great and fair play to Ben and Claire for the teamwork they showed when creating the characters.
Ben then took his Klint and Little Boot designs and created a coloured design for them. Once he had that done he created a character line-up so that we could see the size of each character in correlation to each other. Klint is a massive towering figure and I think Bens blocky design really helps to show this off. Little boot is a small round design and is easily scared. small things like this shape design make for really interesting character correlation and should allow us to convey a lot of emotion during our animation, through body movement.
Animatic
Now that we had our storyboard complete and our characters designed we could set out to create an animatic for our animation. Ben took on the job of doing this and I think he did it really well. The animatic isn't too different from his initial storyboard but I think the little things he added make it really good. Each shot is timed out perfectly and will be a big help when creating our final animation. Ben even added all of the shots numbers in the bottom corner after feedback from Sorcha. This isn't something I would have thought of doing and is definitely really helpful when trying to talk about a specific shot.
Once Ben had finished his animatic Luke then took it and added a voice over and some background noises. Overall I think Luke did a really good job. His voice over is really gritty and I think adds to the intensity of the overall animation. His background noises and music are extremely western and are exactly what we needed. we didn't have much of a script but Luke took the animatic and made it his own with the sounds and it turned out great.