Having now finished my design bible, I feel quite pleased with the final result and the way that it came together.
I was quite worried about how the background and character designs would work together, however I think it turned out alright. Once I finished painting the characetrs and background by hand, I scanned in the images and worked over them a little in photoshop. I feel I learnt quite a lot about using photoshop, as I had barely used it previous to this. I also learnt a little about In Design when putting the pages together, however looking back I wish I had created the bible in portrait as I realised you can't change single page orientations in In Design after I had already started to piece it together.
From the project I think I learnt alot about character design as this was probably something I had less knowledge about when starting the design for the project. I have also realised how much research is needed before starting a design to really get in the right place and have a really good idea of the time period, designs, architecture, style and everything about it to be able to recreate the feel of the situation.
If I were to do this project again I think I would start working on the designs and style of the piece a lot more in advance then I did on this project. I think I focused on the research side of it a little too long, when I should have been thinking about the style and design and characters along side the research.
Even though I worked a little more on the character of Bannakaffalatta towards the end of the project when drawing out the final designs, I still think he is probably my weakest character in terms of design. I found him much harder to design then the other characters, probably because in the script he was a lot more specific, his head had to be a certain shape and his dress was a very simple 1920's diner suit, which is hard to manipulate. I think if I had more time, I would definitely worked more on his design and perhaps even make some really drastic changes and ignore the script a bit to make him more aesthetically pleasing and generally a better design to work with.
I found the backgrounds really nice to design and I found working with one background to find the right style and try and also recreate the images I took inspiration from in this background really helpful and allowed me to experiment a bit. I like the style the backgrounds are in, however I think some of the colours, perhaps in the main entertainment background are a little bright and bold for the background. Again if I had more time, I would maybe play around with these on photoshop and dull it down more or even change the colouring. Having said that, I think adding the shadows and highlighting certain areas really added to the backgrounds and gave them much more depth then in my original drawings.
In the future I would quite like to have a go at stylising my backgrounds a little more, perhaps making them really exaggerated and completely unrealistic, really cartoony, or even go completely the opposite way and create much more realistic pieces, just so that they are a little more one way or the other, rather then being quite an average looking animation background.
I really enjoyed this project and am pleased with the work I managed to produce for the bible, even with the changes and developments I would make. Pre-production is something I'd really enjoy working in in the future. I feel I have learnt a lot about character design, animation design, research and storyboarding from this project and with more and more practise I would like to build up a portfolio of work in this area.
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