#super frog

INTERPRETATION PROJECT:

For the interpretation project we were given a selection of short stories and told to pick one and turn it into an animation based on our own interpretations. For my story I chose “Super Frog Saves Tokyo” by Haruki Murakami. After reading it I decided that until I was done with character design and scripting that I would do no research in the story. That way I would have purely my own interpretation of the characters and the narrative. I started by scripting the entire story. At the time I thought it would be a good idea to animate the whole thing, so I definitely shot way above what I was comfortable with making or even had the time to make. The script ended up being roughly 16 pages long which was when I knew I wouldn’t be animating all of if. It proved a valuable lesson in time management as I had spent so much time on the script that I realise I had neglected the other aspects of the project. I decided to start with environment design as I had a clear image of what I wanted the inside of Katagiri(the main character)’s house to look like as well as the opening shot of my version of Tokyo.

I sketched out a few ideas of what I thought the two could look like on my PC and the decided to start furthering the design of the opening shot/design of Tokyo as I had several ideas for it but none were quite what I had pictured. I was happy with my first sketch of Katagiri’s house so, due to poor time management I ended up sticking with this sketch as the final design/reference for his home.

I spent most of a day designing what I believed to be the best of the sketches that I had done thus far, taking care to add detail to my environment, including translations of signs and advertisements as well as noting that Japan use poles to hold their wires above ground due to the possibilities of earthquakes. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was proud of this as there isn’t much that I dislike about it. However, perhaps I should’ve been more careful with the little time I had left myself.

Since I wanted to animate digitally on Adobe Animate, I scanned in my sketch of the city and painted over it in Paint Tool Sai. Originally I was simply going to outline the buildings and colour them in, however upon looking at how studio Ghibli use painted backgrounds I decided that I would put more detail and effort into the piece. I’m extremely happy with the colour palette, I chose purples and blues because I wanted to avoid using black as much as possible and I’m glad I did. I also made sure to reference the correct colours of the brands shown too such as 7/11 and Royal Milk Tea. Once again though, this took up a lot of my time and left me with roughly 1 week to finish character design, sound design, and an animatic with at least one fully animated part. For my future projects I have decided to plan out everything I do carefully. I went into character design as soon as I was finished, starting with the main character, Katagiri.

Designing Katagiri was interesting. I debated making him a character younger than in the original story but opted to roughly abide to his description, considering all the story gives you is that he’s getting fat and that he’s balding, as well as in his 40s. This effectively gave me free reign over the character. I’m happy with his design but would maybe stylise it differently so that it wasn’t as cartoon-like. However, I’m still happy with this design and the colours. It keeps to the colourful nature of the environment but also contrasts it. I still find it difficult drawing people in certain poses but in terms of people I think this is my best model sheet so far. After Katagiri, I decided to design arguable the most important character, Frog.

This is the model sheet I am most proud of so far. I’m extremely happy with the character design and the varying poses shown on the sheet, the colours used work well after testing them against others (shown to the right of the image). I did some research on what frogs legs/feet looked like to make sure I was going in the right direction, as well as reference for possible colour palettes. I also looked at some other drawings of human-like frogs for reference the hands as well as the colours. This took me a fair amount of time, however I’m glad that I put a lot of effort into my preproduction as it’s what I would have done even if I hadn’t spent so long on the script.

Before I had decided which part of the script I would turn int an animatic, I also did some quick sketches for the nurse character. I’m not too happy with them as they lack quality compared to the rest of the pre production and I’m glad that the design didn’t make it into the “finished” product. Once this was done I realised I didn’t have much time left and opted to make an animatic for the opening of scene 1, and proceeded to storyboard it.

(Third panel will be on a separate post)

I’m happy with the storyboards as they visually convey exactly what I was going for in the script. I’m also glad they I decided to go them digitally as it made the process far quicker which was appreciated when I only had about a day or two left.