Research into animations/ felt

My initial idea is to create an animation based around a rabbit/fox running away from a hunter. I want it to be stop- motion and mainly be created using wire and felt. I want to create a rusty and weathered feel to the main character and his surrounding to match the setting of a forest. I feel like this project could be a helpful step forward for me to attempt to create a decent length stop-motion animation.

I spent a lot of time visually researching into other artists work that I wanted to try and aim for and take inspiration from. I’m drawn mostly to messy looking models that have weird shapes to them and vivid colour schemes. I have had experience creating felt flowers and plants in the past and I enjoyed the process of felting and sewing to create flowers and small characters. I enjoyed working on top of various materials and combining different techniques to create strange, textured objects. I feel confident in being able to create my character and its surroundings using materials such as felt and wire because of the experience I've had working with them in the past. However, I feel like the materials would be expensive and that it would be a very time consuming process for just one person so I find this fact quite daunting.

Edmond by Nina Gantz

I really like the texture of felt and how there's slight movement on the skin and clothes with every movement in this animation. I also like how they combined stop-motion and hand-drawn animation to make facial expressions. I think that if I was to go down the route of using then I would definitely find it difficult to animate the characters facial expressions, so I think I would have the character be mute and focus mainly of the visual story-telling aspect. I also have an awful voice, and would find it awkward to ask somebody else to voice my character.

The Maker by Christopher Kezelos

I really like the overall aesthetic of this animation. It's dark and lack dialogue so the main focus is on the movements and visual story-telling. I also like how this animation is based around a little rabbit creature as I want to base my animation on an animal character.  

I did some brief research into how to create felt objects as I am interested in creating a felt animal for my animation, however I am still unsure whether my story will be decent enough to create an animation for.

My next step is to develop my story further, and also do some visual research into the sort of character I want to create.