Background designs for pitch...

Initial sketches

These are the sketches I used to work my background designs from. I started by doing a few thumbnails of the kind of composition I wanted to create and to get ideas of where I could create the space for the animation to take place. I then drew out the backgrounds below and scanning them in, painted them and worked over them.

Colour versions

Here are the next stages of my backgrounds in colour. I mainly used a mixture of acrylics and coloured pencils to outline or highlight areas. After this I then scanned them in again so that I could work over them on the computer.

Final backgrounds

I really wanted to create a feeling of depth and distance in my backgrounds similar to the backgrounds in Kung Foo Panda and the ones used for the Olympic Monkey ad. To tyr and achieve this, I broke my backgrounds down into layers, cut them up and put them into Toon Boom where I could actually place each layer of the background really far away from one another, exaggerating the distance between the layers and hopefully giving the backgrounds more depth. I also worked over each layer making the ones further away lighter and slightly colder colours, and bringing the images in the foreground into quite bold and strong colours.

foon...

My Foon character in development...

characters in colour...

Below are soem coloured character designs for the animation development project...


















Below are some ideas for backgrounds. With these I am hoping to edit them on the computer and split them up so that I can put them on completely different layers. Hopefully this will give them a lot of added depth and improve them.

morvin..

This is my model so far. I managed to sort out all of the really weird bits where I had two layers which was causing strange shapes and funny faces all over the place. Now I think he looks much smoother all round, everything looks attached. There are still parts I need to sort out, the arms still look a bit odd and the hands look more like gloves and definately need re-shaping, however I'm quite pleased with it as it is, just because I never thought I'd get it looking half decent! I would quite like to add in some details such as buttons, pockets and nice touches as my design was quite simple, however I think I might get going with Foon, my next character and get the basics of her model done before I add onto Morvin.

character designs...

My two main characters - Tapir and Bird...