Applied Animation - week 8

This week, the medium and aesthetic of the animation was still up in the air and i set out to solve that problem whilst guy was still working on the storyboards and Meg was working on the backgrounds and set design.

Despite getting feedback from the crit, i still felt unsure that a watercolour aesthetic was right for our animation. I felt like i wanted to try something different instead of using a generic medium and style. I did a few frames of the grandmother in her chair, just to try out some compositing tests.

When looking at coloured card in the library for the backgrounds, we came up with the idea of animating with white pencil on darker coloured card. This idea was mainly for the care home scene but we are still adapting it for the first scene. I really liked this idea, i felt like it gave the animation a more sophisticated and different aesthetic, which is what we are aiming for as it suits the content and theme of our animation. I tried out lots of different effects for the test but some of them were too much and would look silly.

We were thinking of using a more realistic but still appealing style for the animation. This aesthetic of using the inverse hand drawn frames on coloured backgrounds is better suited to the mood of our animation.

Our main problem was how to link the aesthetic of the starting scene to that of the last scene. We thought it might be good to have the grandmother 'glitch out' slightly every time she says "nice day today isn't it". When i say glitch out i mean her colours could change and her shape could distort very slightly. This would continue until the end scene is just the grandmother in inverse colours.

Meg gave me a background for the first scene so i composited the grandmother and son roughly into the scene to see how it works. Personally i think the scene looks very boring and dull, however i suspect this is mainly due to the colours being very dull and boring. I'm still not sure about the watercolour backgrounds either, i feel like there will be a better way of producing the backgrounds. The watercolour backgrounds just seem to not fit with our aesthetic but again it may just be the colours. Nevertheless i want to try out more ways of making backgrounds.

In terms of the character design, me and Guy were working together to design the characters because then we can work towards a design together which we both feel is a good design and also is relevant to our animation. I learnt a few things about character design when working on our character. I learnt that to make good, appealing, recognizable characters, they need to have distinct physical features to accentuate their personality. The visual side of the character reflects the soul of the character.

I tried using basic shapes and making the character more rounded to suggest more of a friendly and kind character to make the audience feel more compassion towards her.  However having her head more rounded like this makes her feel more cartoony and leads away from the aethetic we were working towards. Having a more cartoony character doesn't mean the animation cant still be serious but in terms of fitting in with the rest of the animation i'm not sure whether this is the best option.