Design for Animation Pre-Production Module Work

This module consisted of planning an animation all the way through from thumbnail storyboard to script to animatic and everything in between. The animatic had to be 20 seconds long  and the rest was pretty much up to us. Below is the presentation board I made (I didn't really know what a presentation board was so I just did a painting of him on fire :) ). It is a shot from a key moment in the animation.

Whilst designing the character I wanted to keep in mind its intended child audience and make it look as friendly and relateable as possible so that people sympathise with him before his demise.

I drew the image below as a tester background based on the research I had done. I liked the simplicity of the colours and how it gave a small depth of field to keep the image interesting without cluttering it too much.

I drew this quickly as a concept for an initial wide shot of where the leaf lived and attempted to give him some back story, but then realised that for a 20 second animatic perhaps this was a little too in depth.

Below is a working storyboard and a section of the finished storyboard. I cut a section out for the final one because I thought that seeing the cigarette stubbed out and his little charred corpse fall out before he ascended to heaved was unnecessary and perhaps a little morbid for its intended audience!

And finally the finished animatic complete with fantastic voice acting by myself and the lovely Calvin Duggan. I realised when it was finished that in fact it is perhaps a little too quick and complicated to understand everything that's going on and that there were other sections that I could have cut, but that serves me right for not doing a test one I suppose. Enjoy !