Potential and Limitations - Technique

Our group differs from most of the others in that half of the animation will be in 2D, and half in 3D. I had my doubts about whether this would work aesthetically or if it would appear jarring, but after discussing with my group more i think it is best that we each work to our individual strengths and think it will actually make a very interesting result. Tom and I will be animating our parts of the animation in 2D, while Alice does hers in 3D. I chose 2D as it is the medium I am most comfortable working in. I think there is a possibility working in 2D will look very flat in comparision to Alices 3D sequence, but i will try my best to avoid this. I am very interested in learning more about 3D but I am not at the skill level where I would be confident in animating in 3D. I have been modelling the backgrounds for the 2D parts of the animation in 3D however, which has allowed me to gain more understanding of the software and to feel more comfortable about using it in future projects. We didnt consider stop motion for our animation because none of us have ever worked with the medium before, and because aesthetically i dont think it would have fit the mood we are trying to achieve in the animation.

Potential and Limitations-Process

To Animate my parts of the project I will be using Adobe Animate. I have decided to use animate because I find its timeline much easier to navigate than photoshops, and in general I am much more confident using it as I have used it for the majority of my animations. One of the downsides of animate as opposed to Photoshop, however, is that there is much less variety of brushes, and photoshop has more tools to make the animation look better aesthetically, but I think the pros outweigh the cons in terms of this project because I am not as used to Photoshop and thus it would take longer. After being introduced to TV Paint, I was really enthusiastic about using it to animate with as I found it very simple and intuitive, but because I dont have access to it outside of Uni It would be detrimental to my project and also put alot more pressure on me to finish my parts of the animation while I still have access to it.

Character and Narrative backgrounds

I have been working on some backgrounds for my groups character and narrative animation. Currently I have been working on the background for the rat detectives office. Because our animation is going to be a noir film style, I researched some classic 50s looking detective offices which id seen in games like Bioshock and different detective films. I took inspiration from these and designed my own office in Maya, which I plan to draw over in photoshop. I am learning alot more about Maya just from modelling the office as a guide for me to draw over and am really enjoying it. After adding lighting i felt it really acheived the effect i was looking for.

After adding lighting

Character and Narrative progress

We pitched our story ideas to the class on friday who then voted for which one we should make. In our group, Alice's story was chosen. Her story is about a rat detective who has an encounter with a spider lady and has an noir 50s theme. I am happy this was chosen as I really like the story and think there will be a lot of cool concept art etc that we can do around the story. We each drew out our initial ideas for the character designs and also talked through the different aspects of the story and the script. I am very interested in doing some background designs for the animation as well as some concept art and character design. We came up with some basic ideas for how the characters would look. Below are my designs for the spider lady character. We want to make her really over sexy, taking inspiration from Jessica Rabbit, but for there to be some comedy in the fact that she has a gross spider mouth.

Telling Tales

The symbols I rolled with the story dice for this brief were a lighthouse, a cat and a wolf/dog. I was really happy with this because it immediately brought to mind images that I thought i would like to create an animation around. I immediately thought of a few ideas and did sketches around them and finally came up with an idea I really liked. My idea is about a dog and a cat who live by the sea in a lighthouse and like to look up at the moon. They see the moons reflection in the water one night and decide to sail out to try and catch it. They pull the moon out of the water and bring it back to shore, where they play games with it and eventually the cat accidentally bursts the moon with its claws. I think this could be a really cute idea and stylistically I would love to do the backgrounds and have the whole animation in black and white and in quite a cartoony style to compliment the story.
Below are some sketches I did of my initial ideas and some character design, as well as a few poses to get see what dogs and cats look like in motion.