Teghan

I finally finished my project. I first had to isolate the head and mouths and edit it together with adobe animate using it auto lip sync feature. I had an audio problem where it simply wouldn’t export with audio so I add to read the audio using ToonSquid. Overall I’m really proud of it as I think it came together really well.

This project also includes us recording a line and using editing to make our mini me’s speak. This means I had to make multiple mouths in different positions so that it could speak.

I landed on them saying “there are to many people at this park” because I thought it was funny. I had to make different mouths as I needed to be able to make all the syllables and mouth movements so there are a few.

Continuing an earlier project we had to make a 3D sculpture of ourselves in the style of the children books illustrator that we chose. It was difficult as the artist has a loose watercolour style that is difficult to translate to 3D.

Fast forward as I forget to take pictures but I mostly used card,paper and masking tape to create them. I ripped up bits of card painted them and them crumpled them to capture the artists style as well as attempting to give them curly hair.

Added details and a face. I tried adding details the mimic the lose linework of the original book, as well as adding black and white strips to the hair to try and mimic it as well.

Took a trip to photo to take a break from our main project and do some life drawings/studies. I thoroughly enjoyed the trip as it was fun drawing the animals in person rather than looking at a picture. I’m not the best realism artist but I think these turned out quite good.

Worked on some master shots for our pitch to help visual the style and look of the show more. I did have a hard time replicating the style but I think they both turned out pretty good.

Scene of the crow falling asleep at the start of the pilot.

Since last week we changed the direction of the culture we wanted to take inspo from. We changed it from Egypt to Celtic so that means the crocodiles design had to be changed as well which I didn’t mind. Micheal, a meme we in my group, suggested we use the otter king from Irish mythology as it was described as crocodile like and was mistaken as one. It also fit into the story we had already created so it was perfect.

At fist I tried combining both traits of an otter and a crocodile and mishmashed them together. It was a bit to crocodile like so I definitely have to rework it some bit for sure.

I then just did a full on otter design to see it making it flat out what it’s supposed to be would work and honestly I do still think I gotta work on it a bit more because I do find it a bit boring.

We decided to use the song I recommended so I thought for my idea to be more clear I should do up some rough thumbnails for the sequence. I won’t be the one doing the final story board but I thought it help make it more clear.

we hadn’t quite decided on the crocs design yet so I made her shapeshifter through out the song to see what does and doesn’t work. I tried to do them loosely but also have them be clear and hopefully there legible.

I had suggested to the group that we use a song from "Epic: The Musical" as I thought some of its themes, framing and story beats were similar. I specifically suggested the song "Get in the water" from the vengeance saga. I think the song really fits the story were trying to tell and can work well with the style and aesthetic were trying to achieve as well.

One of my group members had found 2 board games that they think would really suit the style for our animation. The board game "Root" as well as the board game "Oath". Both games styles have alot of character as they feature sketchy line art and vibrant coloring with simplistic art styles.

I really liked how these styles looked so i wanted to try and recreate them. Me and my friend were discussing how we wanted to reimagine the "crocodile" for Celtic mythology rather than Egyptian so I sketched a few ideas while also trying to replicate the style of the 2 games.

We’re considering an adventure time style so I wanted to draw the crocodile and merchant in that style. However my crocodile design has been thrown out as one member refuses to draw her chest and another wants to lower the age demographic so this is the last time she’ll look like this.

Wanted to draw my own version of the merchant however it wasn’t considered at all so now he just exists.

Put the layout of what we generally wanted to happen. We framed it as a trailer as we’re approaching it as an ad for the whole series. We made out the scenes we wanted to show in the trailer.

We all then chose different scenes to storyboard each. I was tasked with drawing some of the establishing shots so I drew a few in the style that art was like during that cultures Iron Age.

All the storyboards together.

However after this we decided to add and rearrange some of the scenes so I was tasked with drawing new ones for a new scene.

We were tasked with fleshing out our story and creating storyboards, as we were doing that I decided to sketch up a few ideas for the crocodile. I had the idea of making them more of an ambiguous figure meaning if a person from one culture saw them they’d interpret a little differently then another culture. Kinda like every culture has a version of a “dragon” or “demon”. Because of this I changed the original design by adding hair and clawed feet as well as pawed hands.

Drew the design again to get the hang of it and decided to give her 6 nipples, now hold on let me explain. I did this because I wanted an androgynous, angelic feel to her. Like how Satan or angels are, in some pieces of media, given both male and female genitalia. I also wanted it to tie back to the fact that her upper body beside the head is supposed to be a big cat so I wanted to call back to that as well.

Next I drew a dragon, serpent like form inspired by my friends drawing of Scylla they did at the start of this project. It also reinforced my idea in making her a shapeshifter playing into the gender ambiguous, androgynous feel I wanted her to have.

A little doodle as we plan for her to wear a cloak sometimes

And finally a final design. I say this but her design isn’t set in stone and could definitely change but we’ll be using this for now. I’m super happy with it and all I really need to do is study how to draw crocodiles better.

Since our genre is musicals I decided to do a bit of research.

A good channel that goes over a lot of musical theory and is a really good resource for anyone interested in that stuff. some videos of note:

When we decided to do the different iron ages each member of the group was tasked with researching a different culture. I chose to do Egyptian as I wanted to tie in the crocodiles design and traits into it and Egyptian was the easiest way to go.

Egyptian culture as to gods that have the traits of crocodiles, Sobek and Ammit. When I saw them I knew I wanted to combine the into one design as I wanted the crocodile to basically to represent both and be mistaken for either. I also did a bit of research into what the Egyptians were making during there Iron Age and the symbols that mean life and death.

I eventually did combine them however during the sketching our groups idea changed from having multiple crocodiles to just one so my new design after this will feature more vague features to try and make it seem as though any culture could have there own version of whatever god this is.

Today we’re given a new group project. This project will have us look at classic nursery rhymes and reimagine them in a random genre and time. We are to then go through the steps as if we were going to pitch the idea to turn it into a movie show. My group got the nursery “row, row, row your boat”, in a musical genre around, get this, the Iron Age.

At first my group really struggled with trying to find an idea as the time period we got, the Iron Age, is overall a hard time period to set. Luckily we quickly landed on the idea of including multiple cultures that were experiencing the Iron Age. We then focused more on the nursery itself coming to the conclusion to frame the story around a single character. This character would be dead and travelling through different iron ages from different cultures via row boat. This character would also be persuaded by a “crocodile” who wishes to devour the main character however they “play” with the main character through a series of episodes.

Our idea isn’t set in stone yet but we home to have a clear view of the story and themes by tomorrow.

Stated the style studies and it was both interesting and frustrating as I have a hard time with using water colors. I just recreated the landscapes in the book as that’s what I’m gonna recreate in the end.

After that I eventually landed on “Mini and Hardly and the big adventure” by Catherine Rayner as the style I wanted to try and recreate. I started recreating one of the compositions I drew in the park and landed on the circular one as it as most suitable to recreate in my chosen style.

Hopefully I’m able to finish.