week 1 and 2

I began my research into the ideal behind the 3D animated film by looking into varying 3D films on the internet and what makes these films successful. This led me to the idea that character based simple animation seems to be more appealing than busy pieces of animation, at least in 3D. One of the favourites I noticed was the animated short “Alarm” by Moo-hyun Jang / Jung-woo Choo

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=154&t=779445

This was an amazing piece of work featuring just one character with real depth and emotion. I therefore decided that the piece should either be a fantasy based, “unusual” piece or a real world, yet cartoon like with lovable characters that expressed real emotion.

I initially began doodling robotic type creatures in my sketchbook and decided to draw along the lines of a robot that had to drag its arms on the ground to move forward, almost like a wheelchair with one large wheel, something quite unusual and fun to animate. Yet I could not help but feel that concept would be lost in the many robot animations out there (there are some realy great robot shorts), or being compared to Pixars Wall E. I needed something more unique that may stand out.



Therefore I began to look back over the work I completed for the BA honours in Games Design for inspiration for a fantasy based animation. One of the works from the BA was a game about tribes of little creatures that lived in a giant elm tree, fighting of pests and insects.



However I still felt that the piece may become too cluttered and not as simple as a more human type of character.
So I began gathering imagery for mood boards with the idea of developing the piece based on a boys first day on a production line. Simply due to the fact I work in a computer company part time to finance the course, and it seemed apt to feature a similar concept as the animation. With a real world setting the viewer can relate to the story told.
So I began sketching out rough ideas of the main characters to help flush out the concept, while also thinking of the scenario the boy may be presented with.
The initial idea would be a boy, his first job on a production line, and trying to cope with the boredom of the job. Eventually he is helped by fellow workers but this is after many humorous mess ups and day dreams. This really opens the door to a lot of varying emotions from boredom to excitement.

After fleshing out the main character (with a short character biography that I will expand upon latter) I duplicated it to test different colours (note the uniform is always a blue coat for working on PCBs)



Then I finalised the concept with a character sheet featuring varying emotions

At this stage I am quite happy with the concept of the boy, he has enough uniqueness to make the character stand out from the crowd and gives off a sense of his personality.
I then began working on the manager of the piece, now that I had roughed out a short script to give an idea of what needs to be produced in the animation. Again creating a character biography I then began roughing out ideas before I found a concept that I felt described the character the best.