LAUAN503 - Experimentation (Pre-Production) - Gobbs & Skelly (weekly blogs 3)

LAUAN503 

Animation 3: Character & Narrative - Experimentation

Pre-Production - Develop your narrative and design the characters, the props and the world that will be required to bring your story to life as an animated short film

List of Props and Objects
The list of props the group leader gave the group to produce from, of pessary props and items for the animation plot interaction or just background detail as well as character clothing and character concept art.

Character Design, Gobbs the goblin:

As a group we designed individual character drawings and compared them afterwards, we would then collaborate our ideas and design features together.

(Suzy's character art, image for showing character design development)

Beginning with we had Suzy's  

Sketching my idea for a character with the brief thought of the theme of the animation background featuring steam punk and so i designed a suite coat and gizmos with a tattered style. The rest of the character design was already thought up such as the wizard hat and the character being a goblin wizard or mage.

Designing form the short goblin character idea, me and Suzy produced some sketches and coloured digital drawings that show the goofiness and quirkiness of a small goblin with oversized clothing and expressions, also enlarged features such as the ears.

Experimenting with the colour scheme and clothing for gobs the goblin.
(Dan's sketching for gobbs the goblin)

Character design, Skelly the skeleton:

This character went through three stages for redesign so that all of our team agreed that it worked and was going to be reasonable to animate.

(Dan's drafting for Skelly the skeleton)

Adding glow and colouring for a 'mutant' look or glowing ghoul features, experimenting with design.
(Suzy's skelly the skeleton design image)

Suzy's design featured the most radiated looking colouring.

I wanted the colour of the bones to stand out more and dull down the glowing effect and contain it within the bones structure more, such as the ribcage and skull. One of the features I also changed was the ribcage, I made it more more of a compact object without separate ribs but hollow.  

The group leader or 'director', Dan wanted a more ghostly effect for the skeleton, so we decided to go with his design for the character, featuring a more slimmed down version of all our character designs but with the ribcage open and have the ribs floating with a green glow.

Character design, Rat:

For the rat, as a group we decided to have his design more thin and different from actual rat features, giving him longer legs and narrow head with a pointy nose, I had the most influence on this character design and choosing to draw him like this with a long neck also and really long straight whiskers, for added character and quirky humour.

Although it was suggested that I make the eye pupils really small for the sketches and character design because the pupils I drew had been quite large, suggesting a cuter or softer character which wasn't the aim exactly for a rat.


Spell book design and props

These props will be mostly used in development directly from the props list, the group leader is in charge of props and environmental/background drawings and production, so he will choose props and ideas and use them or reduce the detail and simply feature them.