Me and my teammates presented our idea and it went well: they enjoyed our idea and the style we were going for. They also gave us some good advice to go off of, mainly to try and find a source of conflict in the story. Because of this, we went through a few iterations of the story, from the child loving dogs to not liking his grandma’s dog. Finally, we settled on an idea that gave a good plot while still being fairly understandable, and even relatable, to kids: the protagonist is simply afraid of his grandma’s dog, which leads her to teach him about how useful and nice dogs have been to humans through the years.
We quickly drew some thumbnails on Miro, and split them out between us as evenly as we could. We then worked on our storyboards individually; i tried making my boards detailed enough to show all the main movements the characters would take, but still simple enough to be drawn quickly and not look too detailed for an average storyboard.
To make sure we’d keep the designs proportionally and stylistically accurate throughout the project, we also made character sheets for all the characters. For my dogs, I tried drawing them in a way that would make them easily recognizable through their proportions and colours, while still making them “cartoony” and appealing to children, giving them large expressive eyes and basing their designs on simple shapes (which will also be useful when animating them).
We also needed an animation test, 5-10 seconds long, to properly show the style we’d be going for in the final project. we agreed I would do the detailed background and keyframes, Jahiem would do the inbetweens and Calix would colour it in. I did my part, but because of various technical problems we had, we were eventually forced to scrap it and make a simpler one from Jahiem’s computer. I still hold my original keyframes as exercise for the rest of the project; it helped me start better understanding the character designs, and it made me focus on keeping them proportionally accurate.
Once everyone finished their storyboard frames, they sent them to me: I compiled and timed them all together in a single animatic. Fitting everything in around 50 seconds was definitely a challenge, and we had to cut some small scenes to make it, but ultimately we managed to make it work.
We all collected various sound effects for the animations; my teammates sent them to me and I put them in to the best of my abilities. The sound is something we definitely need to work a lot more on, as the video currently sounds very empty: some calm and happy music in the background could be perfect, we just need to find a right tune.
Finally, we re-presented all out work to the people at the Horniman (as well as our tutors), in the form of another Canva presentation, showcasing our designs and the improvements we made thanks to their previous feedback.
https://www.canva.com/design/DAExHq1Qx18/Ov0DiMWGOK1vLzlXPLSTEg/edit
It went fairly well: they seemed to enjoy what we were making and gave us some good advice for us to work on, such as better showcasing the child’s fear of the dog, and separating the real world from the book through the artstyle (we already had plans to do that, but didn’t incorporate it into the animatic, so it was still useful to hear).
Now we have to do all the rest of the animation: in-betweens, coloring, finishing the sound effects and compiling everything together smoothly. It’s a lot to do, especially with everything else we have going on, but it’s doable, and I have faith in us and our project.