charater designs

As there are quite a few different characters in this piece, I want to do them in a style that is very simple, and probably not in too much detail, except for perhaps the characters that are in the animation for slightly longer.
Yesterday as I started to draw the storyboard up, I found it quite hard without knowing what style the characters were going to be in and roughly what they would look like and, therefore, could only really work on the camera angles and getting the basics of the story down.
So today I began to think more about the characters and the style I want the animation to be in. I had a basic idea of this in my head, however when starting to design the characters I found it quite hard to stick to a particular style and really enforce it, without going back to my natural drawing style.

I had a look a various artists or pieces of work that I like and the way they have been created. I love Joanna Quinn's sketchy style of working and was leaning towards this, however as my piece isn't as focused on particular characters I'm not sure it is such a good idea. Quinn's work is very much character based and I think it works so well because there is so much detail in the characters she uses, you really get to know them within seconds. My piece is very much the opposite of this with quite a lot of characters coming in and out in a short amount of time. I think it would be hard to get as much detail as she does into each character and I'm not sure this should really be my focus.

The trials I have done above I quite like, however I think they are a little too bold and bulky for the style to work. I actually preferred these characters before I coloured them, and may perhaps go back and completely rework the colouring as this may simply be due to not knowing photoshop well enough to create more hand drawn looking images.

The other issue I was thinking about is if I made the characters really simple it could work well as a short, however I think it would be much harder to identify particular characters, and more importantly it would be really hard to show what time period they come from and that things are becoming more modern throughout the duration of the piece without details in clothing and hairstyles etc changing.