We were given a brief from the imaginary group NUFSED (I know they're not real, I Googled it :P) to portray them in a good light. We were also given a genre for each group, ours being information. I think our group was quite an evenly spread in terms of what we are good at. Andy assigned as to jobs according to our tutorials. I think he was giving us the opposite of what we wanted seeing as I ended up as the animation artist!
As a group (including three writers) we went off to think of some ideas for our animation. We quickly jotted down a few ideas in pairs to then relay to the group. Some of mine and Lee's ideas were:
- Snow White, sedated for her own protection!
- Kracken, making a reef near you.
- Trolls, protecting Britain's heritage and bridges
- Dragons, not out to eat you... etc.
In the end we came up with a couple of script ideas and the writers went off to expand them, while we went in search of a style. We started looking at 1950s information films. It is hard to take them seriously these days. Videos we looked at include this one. Which is supposedly a guide to becoming popular.
We also decided to do the animation in quite a realistic way using inspiration from 1950s posters such as this one:
We then went back to the writers to see their ideas for the script. They had two ideas:
- This idea expanded on the Snow White idea Lee and I had. Snow White runs away from home and finds the dwarfs home. There they have a drunken, drug fueled party until the Queen sedates her for her own safety to bring her home. This would be to inform people of drug abuse. We decided this idea would be too complicated and too long for such a short project.
- The second idea fitted right in with what we had been researching. It was a forest walk through introducing you to the different creatures you meet in the enchanted forest. I fitted the brief and the genre really nicely. This is the idea we went with.
Even though my role in the group was the animation part I helped with the pre-production quite a lot. I did a few concept drawings for characters. Here they are:
On day two of our collaboration Sarah and Simon worked with the writers to get a good storyline. Simon then drew up a storyboard for us including shots and some rough timings. Here is his first draft:
Lee worked on collecting the sound for the animatic while the rest of us worked on the design. Emma created some lovely backgrounds in the style taken from a 1950s children's book Sarah found.
By the end of the day we realised that we were going to struggle to fit each of our styles of drawing together in time to animate. Also the story needed some tweaking for more comedic impact. Simon redrew some frames of his storyboard:
While Emma drew around all of the characters and shaded them in with suble colours to give a bit of continuity to our work. Heres an example:
This set us up for animating everything on the last day.
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