Once we had our roles sorted out along with a Discord and meeting Sorcha for the first time, we were able to start development on potential ideas for our animation. In the brief we were given a few different directions we could move in, so we discussed a few different ideas we had surrounding these.
Idea Development and Research
We first started off by thinking of some rough concepts, just things which would fall under the headlines, don't judge a book by its cover and stay safe online. These were all put into our group discord by Bethany. Our first ideas included actual humanoid books which would have one thing on the cover but be a completely different book inside, I thought this could be a really interesting idea to animate. We also talked about using Claire's Vampire friend and creating a story surrounding him and the other characters she has.
The idea we focused in on the most was the alternate reality where dragons and cowboys co-exist. The Cowboys hunt the dragons which gives us quite a lot of scope to work with. As you can see we just discussed the simple details of our idea, the personalities of our potential characters and the settings and props which could be used. I was really excited to move forward with this idea because I really love Westerns so this would be a lot of fun to work on.
From here we received some feedback from Sorcha to look at animations such as How to Train your dragon and Cartoon Network shows such as Adventure Time and Regular Show. This was so we could try to get a good understanding of body language and relationships, as well as seeing how they handled morals within a story alongside the comedic aspects.
After chatting with Sorcha she suggested that we take a look at Stephen Silver and his Book, "The Silver Way". Stephen Silver is a renown Character Designer in the Industry and his book is filled with character design tips, examples and exercises to help people create better character. Thus making it a great place for us to start! Stephen is responsible for creating some of the most well known characters over the years, with my favourite being the Kim Possible Series for cartoon network.
Next with Sorcha we discussed what kind of art style we wanted to use. Because our brief was for a Cartoon network show she suggested we look at Scoot Wills, who was the main background artist for Samurai Jack. Along With Scott, Sorcha recommended we look at Mary Blair who was an American Concept artist in the 1940s and 1950s. Scott and Marys styles in someway are very similar in approach with both creating amazing pieces filled with colour and emotion.
Everyone in the Group really liked the look of Scott's work on Samurai Jack and the style of Samurai jack in general. This is when we decided that we wanted to use it as the main inspiration for our animation. Samurai Jack is a cartoon Network which aired in 2001 and was created by Genndy Tartakovsky. Samurai Jack has this really cool style were none of the characters or objects have a stroke on them. It gives this really interesting and seamless look which we wanted to include into our animation.
For our classes we had to take part in, informal presentations were we presented our ideas and progress we had made to the other group in our class. This was a good task as it allowed us to open up our ideas for feedback from Sarah and the other 3D group, which would benefit our team moving forward. For this first presentation we decided to expand upon and narrow down our animations narrative. It is a really simple narrative, which follows a cowboy (Little boot) on his journey through the west as he tries to find a dragon to slay in-order to please his sheriff father. Little Boot is not like his father and doesn't really want to follow his fathers orders but decides he must do it anyway. Little Boot goes on to find his dragon, but not all is as it seems. Hence the underlying storyline, don't judge a book by its cover.
Storyboarding
Once we had our initial story idea developed Claire, Ben and Luke set off to create storyboards for what they thought our animation could look like. I have included each of there storyboards below and would like to give a shout out to each of them for there hard work on them.
To the left we have Claire's storyboard. Claire has created a simple and fun variation of our idea, I particularly enjoy the character design for the sheriff. I think it makes him look like an old-timey prospector and is very cool.
Below we have Luke's storyboard. I think Luke has good an interesting route with perhaps adding more scenic shots throughout his storyboard. This could lead to some nice looking scenes during the animation and really get across that wild west feel. I also enjoy the scene were Little Boot comes across a desert cat of some kind. This adds something different and I think would be fun to animate.
To the right and below we have Bens storyboard. I really like ben's use of lighting throughout. The stark contrast between the black and white really makes it clear in the cave scenes where exactly the light is coming from, and what would need to be lit. I feel that Ben has gone for a really simple approach with his backgrounds, were much in the Samurai Jack style of simple shapes. Ben has created a lot of different camera angles for his scenes, with my favourite being the shot of only Little Boots feet and the dune walk in the middle. I particularly enjoy his character design for the dragon. It is very dog like and different which would make for interesting animation later down the line.
To the left I have shown a picture of a storyboard we as a group created on a whiteboard during class. I think this was a really good activity as it gave us all a chance to have an input on the story and put in ideas for shots that we had. Overall we had 22 shots and the animation had to be 40 seconds long. With this many shots some of them would of had to be less than 2 seconds long, which wouldn't work very well. Therefore we decided to cut out some of the shots we had planned, such as the first, fourth and sixth. We thought that these shots were good but weren't necessary for the animation due to it only being a pilot concept. Now that we had cut the shots down to 19 it allowed us to have roughly 2 seconds per shot, which was more than enough time.
Once we had that storyboard done and finalised we created some simple notes for each of the shots. Basically describing what was happening and any camera movements or positioning we wanted to happen during the shot. Bethany typed these all out and put them into the discord for the rest of the group to access. The final storyboard was pretty much the same as Bens initial storyboard apart form a few tweaks here and there. Overall I am very pleased with the story we decided on and look forward to seeing how it turns out for us.
