Apply - Storyboards and Character design.

For my next brief we have to create 10 seconds of animation from a medium of our choice (That we have experimented with) and it has to reflect one of subjects; Fear, Hate, Love, Happiness, Surprise and Longing.

I have chosen longing. I experimented with a few ideas but have decided I with one idea of a plant creature who longs for beauty. He finds a flower in a forest floor, and longs to own its beauty. So pulls it out and attaches it to his twig head. However the forest isn't happy with his decision and begins to close in on him. The End. Considering this is 10 seconds, quite a bit of cropping may occur, but I like how beautiful this little short is.

Initial Character Design

I started off with a fluid, organic looking character with a ghost-like sapling body.

This then developed into a creepy vine like character, which I decided was going to be far too complicated for 10 seconds of animation. So discarding the arms and legs I created a little bulb like character who bounces and has a twig on his head.

These are some of the images that inspired my final character's design:

Plant bulbs:

The roundedness and the spiny, spindly twiggy details.

And some vegetables:

It also caught my attention that my character slightly resembles Nintendo Pikmin;

This is the example of my short storyboard:

Seen as there isn't much shot variation as it's  5-10 seconds of footage, I have included time scales in seconds to help out the creation process. My storyboard is short but detailed in how the movements will play out. 

I have decided to go traditional and hand-draw my animation seen as this is a new thing to me and would love to play around with this medium more. I will later scan in my sheets and if I have time, create a background and setting.

To familiarise myself with drawing the character which I have named "butternut" (as I will be hand-drawing each frame) I decided to do another character sheet. I also planned what aesthetic the flower will take, seen as it will have magical qualities, which is what attracts Butternut to it, I decided on an elegant looking flower, with sharp edges suiting the aesthetic of the animation. But also I included as if this flower did exist in the wild, with it being so sought-after, it would have a defence technique for insects.

I then tested colour renders digitally on Photoshop (seen as my animation would end up being rendered there).

Digital Butternut render

Seen as I preferred a dark background aesthetic, I tested my renders against a greyscale background, to see what colours coexisted with this environment best, all the tones are quite dark for this reason, but I explored a wide variety of the colour wheel. I decided that the orange body stood out to me the most, it contrasts with the grey, but in an effective way, I don't want him to fully coexist with his background in order to personify my message, but I want him to suit it and orange is successful with this.

Butternut's magical flower render

I wanted the flower to coexist more with Butternut than the environment, so I drew the flowers on Butternut's decided colour of orange. The colour that appeals the most out of this selection is the purple in the middle. Orange and purple are almost opposites on the colour wheel, but when put together they suit really well. Orange and purple also connote of halloween and horror, suiting the dark aesthetic of my animation.