The word 'power' is very broad, so in the ideas generation phase, there were a lot of vastly varying topics to focus the animation around, such as politics, superpowers and energy. One idea that stood out to us due to its simplicity and humour, was one regarding power in the sense of energy/electricity. The concept was inspired by a 'Spongebob Squarepants' animator 'Sean Charmatz', who now creates viral videos where he brings videos of mundane, everyday objects to life via giving them character and expression, resulting in some very funny and creative outcomes, a compilation of which can be seen below-
Sean Charmatz's work
We planned on having a mobile phone (with an animated expression and arms) laid down on a table, who then proceeds to grab a charging cable also on the table, and insert it in itself, which then triggers a vibration (as is typical with most mobiles when plugged in). The vibration would then tickle the phone, before it then takes it out again and gives a nervous scan of the surroundings, thus triggering the loop. We liked this idea as it provides a new look on an overlooked action that most of our mobiles do, as well as being very simple, yet hopefully effective in terms of comedic value. We also thought of using stop motion, utilising an ordinary mobile phone and charger for the base and then animating digitally over the top of it, as we thought it would be a good use of multi-media, and uses a medium that maybe not a lot of others would have thought to use for this task.
However, we soon scrapped this idea as we felt the premise lacked room for development in terms of character and environment designs, and character designs is something I'm very interested in. This then caused us to develop another idea which we came up with earlier, this one focused around the word power in the sense of strength.
The premise for our second idea, was to create an epic and serious looking super-hero scene, utilising camera angles and lighting to show power and dominance of our character. This scene leads to an unknown hand popping into frame, presenting an average pickle jar to the hero, who then proceeds to grab the jar and pop it open, giving the hand the opened jar before reverting back to his initial stance, thus triggering the loop. We liked this idea as the setup would cause the audience to expect an epic payoff, but then divert those expectations by giving this powerful man a very mundane job to do, which we hoped would be funny in the final product. The first job towards making this animation was to design the character and background, due to my familiarity and fondness with character design, I handled that element whilst James took care of the background. Below are some rough sketches which helped develop the character seen in the final piece.
initial design generation
Near final design sketch
Final design sketch
As you can see through these sketches, I experimented with some more cartoonish and exaggerated head designs, including one who's head resembled a pickle jar, thus implying that this glorified hero's sole purpose was to open jars of pickles. My personal favourate was the sketch on the bottom left, however I eventually decided to go for a more natural and "realistic" looking design, whilst keeping the cartoonish nature of my other designs. The reason behind this was simply because I felt the joke behind the piece would have become diluted due to the fact that the humour stems from the way that the scene is set up in a serious manor, therefore by giving a more natural looking hero, the surprise would be greater.
After settling on the character design, James got to work on the animatic and sound design, this was essential, as completing both of these tasks well would emphasise the impact of the piece greatly, which would mainly be accomplished through timing. After seeing what he produced, I was very pleased with the outcome, and the animatic gave me a perfect idea of mine and Jame's combined vision. Below is Jame's animatic.
The next step was to transfer my drawings to a digital format and start animating. As I primarily work digitally this was an easy task for me, but in order to get a better sense of the character and provide bases for the animation itself, I had to draw him from multiple angles, which was much more of a difficult task, mainly due to the characters unique face structure. I feel as though I managed it well however, and am pleased with how he looks from each angle. Another job that was required when going digital was choosing a colour scheme for the character, I experimented with six different variations, but I eventually went for the colour scheme which consisted of greens, as I felt it related back to idea of this super hero being solely purposed to open jars of pickles, but without it being so obvious.
Colour tests
Character expressions
Angle variations
Full body shot
Although I am familiar with animating on Serif Draw Plus, I have never produced a full stop-frame animation, as I typically use key-frame. This meant that I had to redraw each aspect of the drawing that changes from frame to frame, instead of simply moving individual aspects and allowing the software to fill in the gaps. This proved to be a much more time consuming method, but ultimately allows for more realistic movements, and as this will only be a short animation, I would give it a go. Before animating frame by frame, I first drew out each key pose from the animation and timed it to Jame's storyboard. The result of this can be seen below, this proved to be very helpful in the animation phase, as I had a clear idea of how I want an action to end and how much time I want dedicated to reaching/holding that action.
I drew out and rendered each frame individually, before then moving them into 'Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum', and positioning them the timeline, using the animatic to map them to the correct timings. At this stage, James had sent me his final background, allowing me to chroma key the red background out of my animation and place the scene behind it. I was very satisfied with the background as it utilised a low angle to signify power, therefore emphasises the theme behind the piece.
The hand and cape were animated separately so that I could preposition them at will in their separate layers without interfering with the other timings. Unfortunately, when it came the previewing the animation I felt the actions occur too quickly, making it hard for the audience to comprehend what is going on and gives each action an unneeded sense of urgency. This was easily resolved however, simply by making each frame last for twice as long. On the downside, caused the frame-rate to be halved down to 12 fps, making for a less smooth looking animation. After everything was positioned, the video could be rendered.
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