I thought I’d start off on the concept art with an exploration of how the ‘real world’ will look. As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I want to have a lot of contrast between the daydream world and the rest of the film. Since I plan to make the thoughts and daydreams more wishy-washy and misty, I wanted to make this more solid looking to differentiate the two.
To do this, I tested out my first attempt at hybrid animation techniques!
I used pre-made 3D assets to map out the room, keeping in mind how I was planning to animate in the shot, before drawing over them in the 2D hand drawn style. The very flat colouring wasn’t planned, but while working on what was meant to be the base colours, I really liked how it was looking, and I think it helps make the cluttered background look slightly less overwhelming. Backgrounds aren’t my thing, but I like how this one turned out!
For animating the real world, I’m thinking I want to try and keep the shots more static, with more limited animation, again to create that contrast – which I kept in mind while planning out this test background. So, I needed to make sure that it would feature all of the assets that needed to be there for the shot I was wanting. This would be one of the earliest shots of the film, and therefore the morning routine aspect of the whole, ‘day-to-day life of a telepath’. At this point, I’m thinking I want to depict the telepaths housemate coming down the stairs, making herself a coffee, maybe checking for mail, and then slumping down at the table to segue into a daydream about anime. When arranging this room, I also wanted to keep all of this on the righthand side of the screen, so that I can have the main character travelling left-to-right for the first part of the day, and then reverse it when she’s coming home.
At this point, I think my next aspect of the project, I’m going to get started on actually boarding the thing. I’ve got a bunch of notes, and a ton of it planned out in my head, I really just need to actually bring that all into reality as something I can actually show people at some point!