Early Days... The Bird

Because my show reel is about Animation, I want to make sure I can get some great quality animation pieces in there. The number is not so important; as long as the pieces are of the best quality. Two things that first sprung to my mind that I have not animated and up to present remained hesitant to do, is an explosion (which yes I have done before, but I wish to attempt one on a bigger scale, and play with timing a little more) - an effects piece of animation, and a Bird-cycle. Now to integrate these into a narrative piece, I intend to foster these animation sequences into what I like to call 'Mini-Movies' which are contained little pieces that are immersive in their own right, for just long enough to keep an audience hooked on it, but it's not such a loss when the next piece begins amidst the reel.

To begin with 'The Bird' as I call it; The Bird will be an inspired little bird-flight cycle that I intend to hand animate using the Wacom Bamboo. Below are a couple of concept sketches and colour-keys that I have created in the last week that I hope i can get working in the final piece.


Mood Board/Section of design inspiration...

I love the Golden Age Limited Animation cartoons. They are the ultimate source of inspirational fuel for my own work. The impression of illusion that they achieve through their limitation in artistic direction is what gives them their ultimate charm. The very idea that these artists would use only triangles to create the impression of tree's - versus the use of more intricate artistic methods to acheive the same result, when to an audience more interested in gags and characters, it's just a tree is truly remarkable. And I find myself revisiting the area that I feel a connection with and adding a new piece of animation (a bird-cycle that iv'e never tried before) that will compliment the piece, and 
push my animation abilities even further at the same time. 


So from the mood board, here we have the earliest sketches that I mocked up, that just visualise the art style I wish to visit for this piece - any sketches that can run away with themselves in this style, just to develop intricate shapes and designs to make the mini-movie ever more appealing will be an asset to the final piece.

More environment development... Shape development. 

Early morning Cloud Sketches, 

The Final Storyboard and shot - plan. 

So I want the shot to pan upwards, from the ground so that it helps create that sense of place - establishing that, before showing the bird in flight will make compliment the piece visually, but also make the bird seem more convincing in it's environment. 

The road that i decided to integrate into the final design is, I must admit a homage of sorts to the Matte-Backdrops used in 1939's timeless 'The Wizard of Oz' where the yellow brick road's perspective is artistically warped to look almost normally impossible in the far distance in the backgrounds. This illusion not only gave Oz it's distinctive look, it helps separate it from reality and keep it in it's own strong world basis - which in my own design, is something that I wanted to create. 

And Colour Mood-boards, and finalised colour choices. I wanted to make it feel very natural, and not so artificial, and not stray towards something that did not feel natural. I am afterall warping reality to my advantages and turning it on it's head essentially, and so I feel that using the right colours and lighting practices will not only help pull it down and make it more plausible and recognisable naturally without force, it will also look like it's meant to, which is very naturalistic. 

So extracting colour idea's from the images above, which are taken from forests scattered across the U.S State of Oregon, I have presented this colour palette - which allocates sectors to my deisgn. The greyscale in the finalised design allows me to also recognise my depth in my shot as of when it comes to applying colour. 

Hence...

I do however, want to put a little visual twist on the character animation. I don't really want to use the 'clean-look' character line use in Limited animation. Instead I want to break the mould a little bit, and integrate a little bit of my raw, visceral sketching line quality into the polished piece. So essentially it looks a little bit like a coloured in-pencil test. At this moment, i'm also thinking that the rawness of the line quality will also help give the bird some character - of it living in the wilderness and it not being well groomed like a zoo or home-kept bird. This in turn will give the bird character.