After presenting our animatic and test animation, we received some helpful feedback from our tutors as well as the people at the Horniman: the most important takeaway was that we needed to firmly establish something within the artstyle to differentiate the scenes happening in the “real world” and the scenes inside the book. To do this, we decided on a few key differences between the two: the most noticeable was having the bedroom scenes drawn with a regular brush, whereas the book scenes would be drawn with Harmony’s charcoal brush, which gives lines a rougher style to them, and makes them look more like hand-drawn illustrations. We found this to be a great idea, as it establishes the book sections as being drawings even in the (already drawn) world of our animation, as well as giving it a very child-like feel.
Our second idea was simplifying the characters’ eyes in the book scenes: while the bedroom scenes show the kid and grandma having large, expressive eyes, the book scenes simplify them to dot-eyes, making them appear more simply-drawn while still retaining a cartoony nature to them. This change was even applied to the dogs, making for a small but noticeable design change.
And finally, we made sure to have the scenes in the book have more varied, brighter colour schemes than the limited colours we decided to use on the bedroom scenes (which we ended up deciding on after going through a few aesthetic color palettes). We made the room focus around reds, oranges and yellows, to give a warm and welcoming feel to the environment, as any kid’s bedroom should feel.
Another big change we made to the plot was the kid’s influence on the book: before, we were planning on only having him listen to the story, which would contain random humans along with the dogs (as shown in the animatic). But after a talk with Su-Lynn, we decided it would be more fun to have the kid brought inside the book and interacting with the dogs himself, thus overcoming his fear. It was a quick and easy change that greatly improved the feeling of our story.
With all that settled, and everyone’s frames decided on, we began fully working on the animation: I had the beginning and ending shots, as well as a shot with grandma entering the kid’s bedroom, and two dogs. I started by importing the animatic’s storyboards into Harmony, thus having some timing set already. Then came the rough movement and background, to make sure I had the characters’ animation and setting down before starting to clean them up. My first challenge was making the bedroom door open slowly enough to be mysterious, and also keeping it looking right with the forced perspective the shot was in. It took a few attempts, but I was eventually able to make it work.
Then I’d move on to cleaning up the movement, which was time-consuming but fairly easy. Finally, there came colouring, which was probably the most annoying part of the whole operation: Harmony is extremely finicky when it comes to what lines it does and doesn’t close, so for almost every frame, I would have to go and look for what small holes between lines I had previously missed to make sure it didn’t fill in wrong spaces. Once again, not really hard, but very time-consuming.
Still, the whole process was fairly smooth: I worked on the opening and ending shots first, then moved on to the dogs, and finally worked on the shot of the grandma entering the bedroom.
There were some highlights: remembering how to use nodes was very useful in having the husky dogs run across the screen without me having to manually drawn them in every single frame, as well as making a few scene transitions appear very smooth. And getting the lighting to look nice and realistic in the bedroom scenes was a challenge that I think ended up paying off, as I really like how it ended up looking.
I studied and imitated a lot of the characters’ movements in order to draw them as realistically as possible, and I think it really helped in some instances, like with the grandma sitting down and getting up from the bed.
When all the animation was done, we finally put the sound together, with both new and old sound effects, as well as a happy music that played over the book scenes.
All that’s left is the PDFs, and then this project will officially be over. Submitting the video to the Horniman was a huge relief, and I’m very proud of the work we managed to do. It pushed me to try new things I’m not quite used to doing in my work, and I’ll keep trying to experiment in my work moving forward.