S T U D I O P R A C T I C E: OUAN05 - Development Feedback

Right now, I'm quite happy with where I am in terms of development for 'The Classical Elements' brief. Having nailed down all of my initial ideas and concepts and having produced artwork to help envision what I intend for this project, I can begin to tidy up my designs and start a more final draft for the storyboard. For this project I wanted to try something different, previously I have based my animations on story and developed the animation style accordingly. Because of this, the quality of the animation has suffered. In order to try something new and change the way I've been approaching animation so far, I intended from the start to produce a piece of work that was dependent on the animation quality and not the style. The idea behind the animation and relating it back to the the brief involves the meeting of two warriors on a road or in a village, I have yet to decide what kind of warrior they are but I'm fairly certain it will be either a viking or a samurai to give the animation a raw feel and a context. The warriors, whatever they turn out to be, will either be made of ice or possess weaponry made from ice, thus as they battle it will break and melt due to the brittleness of ice and the nature of it. I wanted to take water and experiment with its range of forms, I may also include steam, fog and water itself if I get the chance to incorporate them in also.

Today, I showed some of my peers the work I had produced so far for the project. We discussed the obstacles I would have to overcome in order to make this work, two of the main points raised included the character design and the choreography of the duel between the two characters and handling the interaction between them. In order to be able to produce the full animation that I want to with the emphasis on fluidity of animation I need to look heavily at motion firstly, and it would also be very helpful to perform something that I can use as reference when drawing the frames so I can capture the movement accurately. Something that was mentioned that could be used as research is some of the scenes from martial arts films, where the fluidity of movement is very smooth and fast paced, this is something I could incorporate into my animation.

The next thing I need to look at is the overall design of characters. I have produced art work to determine the style of the characters but I will need to simplify them much further so that they aren't too complicated to draw and animate when it comes to it. Something I was considering doing for this is creating something like a 'chibi' version for the characters, so that the shapes and proportions are much smoother and less detailed, this would also allow for smooth limbs for example, which would be great. Character design is something that I need to think a lot about for this because I can use the simplicity of characters clothing and shape to my advantage when animating.

I spoke about my references for the animation, and the types of locations I have been looking at for the setting of the animation. My favourite idea for a location is road or village in ancient Japan, with old style buildings and temples in the snow, this would collaborate well with the fact I'm experimenting with ice and water, because of the cold climate.

In terms of audio, I looked at the animated series; 'Samurai Jack', because I recall it was very simplistic. The audio style is very atmospheric and tense because it doesn't feature any music, only sounds of footsteps or the clashing or metal for example and environmental noises such as wind. This is something I'd like to be able to replicate to some extent if I were to add audio and sounds to my animation.