John's Art work and Animation Blog: May 2011

Well for this project I decided to work with on a short animation for children on the dangers of playing with fireworks.

To start with on this project I had to look at the concept as a whole, fireworks and there dangers, from there I took a look at how I could create something for a targeted age range, mainly pre school to infant, which meant I spent a lot of time watching the CBBies and Nick Jr, looking at all the pre-school shows.

As a staring point on the actual story line I used a thumbnail storyboard that I did towards the end of last year, which was about two monsters, un-named at the start, playing with fireworks as a joke, but after some further development and fine tuning I managed to create a story that was 18 panels long.

In order to develop my characters I looked at characters like the Cat in the Hat, The Grinch and other Dr Susis characters. As the original version of the story had a character that looked like the cookie monster from Sesame Street I redesigned him to be more friendly looking and less likely to be a copyrighted character.

What did I find most interesting in this project?

The most challenging element I found while I was working on this project was setting my own deadlines for key production elements, such as animatic to key’s, to cleaned and finished, I feel I have created something that if I enter it into a competition such as BAF I won’t feel ashamed to be entering it.

In a way I feel that I have copped out on the lip-syncing as I used a whistle for the characters voice, similar to the way the Clangers where produce, as this removed the need for complicated lip-syncs, which I feel aren’t my strongest point but I plan to rectify that by doing just some simple dialog work before I even attempt to create something that is dialog heavy, such as a story I am creating called Battle-fortress Destiny which is a major re-write of my original graphic novel title ‘Stargate Omega’,

What did I find the most enjoyable in this project?

The thing I found most enjoyable was the freedom I had over my work, not that the work I did in the second year didn’t allow me this, but this year the only major factor that I had to contend with was keeping my mind on track, and on the whole I believe I have done this as I had set out to crate a fully animated short for the under 8’s about the dangers of fireworks.

The why that I made sure that both the story and the characters were appealing to this group was to test out my designs on the younger members of my family, that’s correct I used human’s as lab rats I am evil, but this allowed me to discover if my characters where friendly enough for this age range or if I needed to make them more friendly. As it turns out my youngest relative has taken to drawing the main character instead of the normal characters that he draw’s.