Final Major Project

We continued progress on our project beginning to finalise the scripts deciding which ending plot we wanted to go for, a more tragic route or neutral. We made both ideas into storyboards which altered shots and scenes, picking the best moments we liked from both so we could combine it into a story we all agreed to tell. This also allowed us to also make an improved logline and keep our schedule consistent, having dates for progress in mind it helped us pace ourselves, what we can achieve along with personal roles. My personal roles including Producer, concept artist, animator and sound designer.

Week 4 we have experimented with small animations, ranging from environmental scenes to character focused animation, we produced small loops to see what style of animation we wanted to go for intimately settling with 2D frame by frame. This was particularly good for me as my area of focus was 3D animation, so the opportunity allowed me to get a better understanding and improve my skills which I lacked in while also using my 3d knowledge to help me animate characters and moving backgrounds.

More exploration of designs, the team all came up with multiple and narrowed down what features we had in common from species to markings. This gave us a lot to work with on what we wanted our protagonist and view points to be, some designs not working for the purpose of the plot such as to keep the innocence of the angel we wanted small winged bright designs and have a contrast to our other protagonist with an opposite personality and experiences. With my designs I wanted to make sure none of them were over complicated so we would not have trouble keeping the animation consistent, for example no floating markings, shapes or gradients.

After doing the research and getting the basic elements we wanted to base our animation around, we started the concept art phase of the production. Where we got to experiment a lot with visuals, if we wanted a more abstract approach or realistic. We drafted multiple plots some including a human lead character and an angel companion. While we wanted to keep the angel companion in the story we scrapped the idea for the human lead and changed the perspective to an animals, instead making the humans the villains as it helped convey the emotion we aimed for our story, that being the destruction of humans.

In week 1 for our Final Major Project we researched our initial ideas from the individual summer projects and developed them into one consistent plan we wanted to progress with. The theme we all shared involved gods and elements of religion/angelic creatures, we wanted to expand upon these ideas so looked into different types of gods and beliefs. From historical stories with Greek and roman gods to biblical angels which were often depicted creatures with multiple eyes and wings. Since a lot of the references had included animals, such as Pegasus and Cerberus we also explored mythology and wanted to incorporate animalistic characters to our story.

2D animated short produced by animation students; Khaotu Kumwongdee, Maizie Butler-Copley & Nicola England.