Extended - concept stages

For the extended project, I decided to work in a group with Tess and Meg. We got together early on and brainstormed ideas after Tess told us about a concept she came up with that centered around two characters, with the animation ending in meteors falling to earth, which would leave it as an open ended pilot. We decided early on that I would be in charge of the character designs because that's what I want to pursue once I leave university. tess would be in charge of the script writing, and we would share animating and storyboards between us, in order to lessen the load on one person.

We decided to base our idea on two young adults, who live together. The characters would have two different personalities, which would clash on a regular basis, which would make room for gags between the two.

We would utilize that fact that they were vloggers through the use of youtube-like layout that would have a mouse click through the videos in order to see what they do. The idea was to have an anonymous person clicking through these videos, and it would end on a live stream of the meteors crashing down to earth, with their reactions on camera. This anonymous character would add a sense of mystery to the animation and would hopefully leave viewers confused and intrigued.

Here, is one of the many brainstorming sheets that we had. We would sit down and come up with funny gags and video ideas, taking inspiration from millennial vloggers that are so popular now. The animation would be a sort of running comentry on how weird and pointless these vloggers are. We decided that one of the characters should be really bad at things but thinks she's good, and the other character should be good at everything but oblivious to her talents.

Style Moodboards

We decided to get together and put together moodboards based on what aesthetic we wanted to aim for with our animation. We took inspiration from animations that we had seen at Annecy such as, "I Like Girls", "Manivald" "Pussy" and "Wednesday with Goddard". We enjoyed the aesthetics and stories that these animations had to offer, because they were unique and seem to express the creative direction which animation seems to be going.

We also added some illustrations and background concept art for inspiration. We want the background to be bright and colourful, as well as pattern heavy, in order to juxtapose the finely lined characters that we are thinking of.

Character Moodboards.

Because I was in charge of the character designs for our project, I decided to put together moodboards in order to get the ball rolling with my ideas. 

Zorina

For character 1, We decided to call her Zorina Destiny- Hope Strong in order to fully capture the ridiculousness of the character just by the name. 

This character would be the more ridiculous one in the dynamic, However, she would come across as a loving character in the end. 

Here, I decided to create a moodboard of clothes that I thought Zorina would wear. She would have quite a relaxed and "Boho" sort of style to fit with her relaxed and Hippie-like mentality.

Hazel

Hazel on the other hand, would be the more reserved yet pretentious character. We wanted to base her around art students at our uni in order to poke fun at how serious young people can sometimes take themselves in the form of attitude and clothing.

 Clothing wise, I wanted her to look quite simplistic yet edgy, which I feel would come in the form of black and white clothes, as well as edgy and ridiculously obnoxious shoes.

Overall the first two weeks of the project seems to be going great. We have decided to meet up next week to have a little texture and concept art creating workshop.