Client Project

For my live client I decided to enter into the D&AD Student awards and go for the Animation design brief. The Project requires creating and animating a character to protray it's personality. The film to fit the brief should be between 20 and 60 seconds, time permitting I will create a longer animation for my University project deadline, which is a few weeks later than the D&AD deadline.

To create the animation I will design a character and develop a storyboard to plan the animation. The character I think will need to be long limbed probably in proportion to an adult human. Characters such as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck spring into mind as they were very expressive characters.

The Artifacts

I will design a simple cartoon style character which will be used for the artifacts. I will research into character design over the christmas period by looking at classic characters.

The first artifact will be a quick animation of the final character showing full movement in either a cartoon style stretch or yawn. The following artifacts will be different animated gags inspired by classic cartoons or even silent move style slapstick.

The animation artifacts will then be shown to a audience who will give feedback on the gags.

Personal Research Project Essay

My essay was researching humour in animation and the best mixture of child and Adult humour to appeal to all age groups.

It was inspired by my love of Looney Tunes, early Simpsons and modern computer animation mainly from Pixar's Animation Studio. It was also written as I feel so many Animations get the child and adult mixture wrong or just simply not that funny.

For me many computer animated films of today rely on talking animals for appeal and as a result are aimed at a young audience. While Pixar have always set out to make original well writtain stories and as a result appeal to all ages.

In a later blog I will talk about my love of Pixar's Ratatouille, I have noticed somthing quite interesting which seems too much of a coincidence not to have been done deliberately.

Finished Storyboard

Here is the finished storyboard which includes the required pack shot. As I said in the last post the 2D background and objects were build using Fireworks.

Bug Character

I decided to build character in 3D and to have a 2D background. To make the character suit the 2D surroundings I used the Ink and Paint materials setting for the characters body colour.











The only other object built in 3D Max was the shaving foam. This was achieved using the Torus object ie;the donut shape object. Noise was added to the oject to make it rough, then turbosmooth was used. In the material edited the glossiness was turned low to take off the reflection of the material to look like foam.






I took shots of the character posed to match the sketched storyboard, then took shots of the character with different coloured skin to represent the bar scene. I then could make the final storyboard with the 2D background and objects, which were done in Fireworks and the finished storyboard will be in my next post.

Final Storyboard sketches

Here is the final sketches of the storyboard with the final shots I intended to use. My first sketches were all long to mid shots, so I changed the views to focus on the most important point of focus in the shot.










As you can see the different shots make all the difference to the shots and the sketches look more interesting as a result.





























The only shot missing is the final pack shot.

Simulated Client Project

My final idea for the 30 second Advert, funnly enough came to me in the pub. The gag was that an insect mistakenly uses an Insect repellant instead of a Deodorant. When I left the pub I wrote down the idea and the first draught of the storyboard.




My idea was to start the ad with a character in the shower. The shower gets turned off and a towel is shown being wrapped round the character behind the shower curtain. The curtain is pulled back to reveil a bug. The bug then gets out of shower and puts on shaving cream and begins to shave.





The bug then reaches for a bottle of deodorant, but picks up the Insect repellant instead. The bug then sprays the repellant on his body. The bug then ends up in a bar on his own repelling all the other bugs in the bar, I also had the character standing at the bar adding to the gag as he's a "Barfly".