afterwardstheproject

[afterwardstheproject]

Looking back...

From this brief I believe that the most important thing that I’ve learnt is the importance of having a fully-fleshed out plot and characters before the rest of the Pre-production stage can be carried out. I learnt very useful techniques and tricks that were put in place to help me with writing a good plot for my story, and I know that moving forward I will definitely utilise the tricks I have learnt. Furthermore, I learnt new tricks to implement into my storyboards to aid with storytelling and help improve future storyboards I am to create, as I know I definitely want to do more storyboard work in the future as I believed it helped improve on my art style by pushing me out of my comfort zone which helped me create satisfying backgrounds, character poses and character expressions.

I am very pleased of the work I created for this brief, but I think moving forward I would definitely challenge myself to produce more environment concept art as I only had one design for the waiting room, and I found myself wishing I had created a piece for the Nurse’s office and the college hallway. Overall, this module only confirmed my desire to work with creating more pre-production materials in the future, especially as I now feel that I understand the Pre-production process significantly better than I did when I first started working on this brief.

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Storyboarding (part 2)...

[afterwardstheproject]

Storyboarding...

I found the storyboarding process overall to be challenging because of the different angles I had to recreate, especially when I needed to incorporate environments into my frames if I wanted an establishing shot, for example.

I needed to use a lot of references of different images of different rooms as well as look at tutorials on how to draw rooms in different angles, but from looking at my final frames together as a whole I feel proud of what I was able to create and overall really enjoyed the storyboarding process.

I definitely found that certain factors definitely helped the process move a lot smoother such as fully fleshing out my plot before I got started, writing out my script as detailed as I was able, and creating my thumbnails. I found that my illustrations also seemed to improve slightly with each frame, so I definitely feel like storyboarding got me out of my comfort zone with my illustrations regarding the different angles and backgrounds, and I was able to draw looser and more expressive figures with each frame I drew.

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Character Turn-Arounds : Fran and Monica

The last thing I did before creating my storyboard was create two character turn-arounds for the main two characters I would be using in my storyboard, Fran and Monica (her human appearance).

If I had time, I would have created two additional boards – one for Effy and one for the school nurse, however, I ran out of time and wanted the two turn-arounds I was able to create to be the best quality I could manage in the time I had. I followed the inspiration I had taken from older cartoons as best as I could as well as still using the styles from the games Sally Face and Fran Bow as inspiration, as I still really liked the art styles and thought they would still fit in well with the aesthetic I was aiming for.

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Scripting (Part 2)...

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Scripting...

I was almost ready to start my storyboard but before I began, I wrote out a script to use as a guideline for when I came to sketch out my final storyboard.

After writing out the script I wanted to follow, I sketched out thumbnails to further help me when producing my final board.

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The Setting...

I had decided on the scene I wanted to focus on, so I next created a concept for the Nurse’s office waiting room that would be the primary location used in my storyboard. My inspiration was taken from various images found on Google of different rooms found in schools from the 80s – even though I wanted my story to take place in a college, I thought these images fit in well with the 80s aesthetic I was aiming for.

I also came up with two supporting characters that would fit in well with this environment that I had illustrated. One was the college Nurse/Counsellor who has a big role in the beginning of the scene and the additional character who sits behind the front desk in the waiting room. Although she didn’t have a significant part in the scene, I added the second character to emphasize the plot point I had of humans and monsters casually living alongside each other in this short scene whilst not taking away from the main story I was trying to follow with Fran meeting Monica.

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Final Character designs and Plot...

I ended up choosing to focus on the first episode I wrote about which was Fran’s (Frankenstein’s monster) character. I did this because out of all the characters I had created I found myself gravitating more towards Fran as a character and from the random plot ideas I was coming up with they seemed to support the idea of Fran being the main character and almost ‘leader’ of the group. Because I was focusing on Fran’s episode, I decided to prioritise character designs for him, Effy (The Vampire) and a new character I came up with to support the story progression in Fran’s episode – Monica. Originally, Monica was to be a ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ type character, but after thinking about it for a good while I decided that it would be more interesting if she started off as a human, like Scott (The Ghost).

I wanted Monica’s design to mostly express her personality, showing her as the spunky character that I intended her to be. The ‘monster’ variant of her design was based on Cyndi Lauper and obviously the original Bride of Frankenstein design. Alongside the development of Monica, I developed the plot of episode 1 using the grid technique

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Synopsis...

Based on all the information I had been jotting down, I came up with a very rough outline of the plot that I was to work on. I wrote out vague ‘episode’ plans and this led me into creating more characters to help support each of the main characters individual stories. I was very careful on trying not to over-complicate things, so I decided that some characters would be exclusive to certain episodes/character stories. I wanted to write out every episode even though I decided near the beginning of receiving the brief that I only wanted to focus on creating pre-production material mostly for clarity reasons and I thought it would help ensure that my plot flowed correctly, and I knew where the story was heading. I also wanted to give myself a choice on which episode I wanted to focus on, and I could choose my favourite when they were all written out.

From receiving constructive criticism from my peers, I was able to tweak this synopsis and finally I was happy with it. In addition to finishing my synopsis, I decided that instead of being a game, my story would be told as a 5 episode long animated series for adults. I decided this because I thought it would give me more freedom with the storyboarding and I would be able to use camera angles and certain techniques more freely, as in the games I was initially studying the animations were rather limited just because of the type of games that they are, and I really wanted my pre-production materials to be for a 2D animated project.

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Changes and colour pallet experimentation (Part 3)

I also experimented with colour schemes. I wanted my characters to each consist of very bright colours to fit in with my aesthetic but also tried the option of each character having a more subdued colour scheme which was a little more in line with my art style and also the styles of Fran Bow and Sally Face, my biggest inspirations for the project thus far

When presented with all of my options, I went for the brighter colour palettes for every character, deciding that the monsters of the story should all look brighter and more ‘out of place’ and any humans I design should have more subtle colour schemes to support the idea that the humans in the story ‘blend in’, unlike the monsters. The reason why the ghost doesn’t have a bright colour scheme option is because I wanted him to appear separate from the other four because of what happens in the storyline, and I also wanted to emphasise that he wasn’t initially a monster, and was a human when he was existing with the other members of the group.

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Changes and colour pallet experimentation (part 2)

The majority of my character design research consisted of looking at 80s style and fashion in general and types of characters that have been portrayed as these monsters in other media. I found myself taking a lot of inspiration from the mood-boards I made from the research I did.

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Changes and colour pallet experimentation (Part 1)

Although I had my first designs for the main five characters to be used in my game. It was after this point I came up with an idea for a major plot point for my story. I decided that the group of friends weren’t necessarily a group of mystery solvers like the gang in Scooby Doo. They were simply a group of friends who are trying to grieve over their friend, a human, who went missing some time ago. Because of this I decided to scrap the creature from the black lagoon inspired character in favour to support this change, replacing the fifth member of the group with a ghost character – the spirit of their friend who doesn’t live on with them but instead resides in a world parallel to their own, waiting to move onto the next life. I also decided to re-design the characters I had minus the creature from the black lagoon in order to fit in more with the 80s aesthetic I wanted.

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The characters...

Before I started working on my synopsis, I needed to come up with the characters that would help me direct the story I wanted to tell.

I wanted the amount of characters I had to reflect the ‘Mystery gang’ in Scooby Doo, so I decided to have five. This worked out well because I was planning to follow the same format as Sally Face and Fran Bow, both of these games consisting of five episodes in total. I thought that my game too could be made up of five episodes in total, with each episode following individual stories of each character, and then I would perhaps add one more additional episode to tie all 5 stories together into one satisfying ending.

I initially decided to base my main characters on the monsters Dracula/Vampire, wolfman, Frankenstein’s monster, Zombie and a sea-monster/creature from the black lagoon. These were the initial designs I had for my main five, each inspired very loosely on the five characters from scooby doo whether it be their personalities that I originally had in mind for them or some aspects of their appearance/way they dressed.

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My Inspirations...

I started to work on my initial story idea, adding to my notes every time I would come up with something new such as a new character or a small plot point that could be of use when I had to write out my final synopsis. Whilst doing this, I began to think about how I actually wanted this story to be told, and how I wanted the artwork/style to look. I eventually decided that I wanted my story to be told via a point and click style game which would be made up of episodes. I came to this conclusion after being inspired by Games such as Sally Face and Fran Bow. Both of these games rely on the story being told through the player interacting with different characters, props and settings, the animations generally being 2D and the environments being explored through a side-scrolling format.

I also decided that I wanted to base the aesthetics of the game on the 80s, taking inspiration from the likes of ‘Stranger Things’, ‘IT’ and various films from the 80s. Because of this decision, I initially wanted to base the style of my work loosely on 80s cartoons. Because I still wanted to use my basic drawing style, I tried to base the colouring style of my illustrations on cartoons of the 80s and 90s as best as I could, using more textures than I usually would to replicate the ‘fuzzy’ colouring that older cartoons seem to have.

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Brainstorming...

When first presented with the brief I tried to brainstorm story ideas as soon as I was able to in order to come up with as many storylines as I was able so that I had options when it came to writing out my final synopsis. I initially struggled a bit but was able to narrow down my thinking by asking myself about the types of characters I wanted to create and secondly the genre I wanted my story to follow. This helped me see my ideas a little more clearly and I ended up with three vague stories to choose from after making note of the ideas I came up with by putting them into a mind-map.

My First Idea was a story I wanted to be based on the ‘Film Noir’ genre. During the Summer I spent some time playing a videogame that was of this genre and found myself being deeply inspired by the storyline and characters, and I wanted to come up with an unlikely detective character who’s trying to solve a murder mystery but regularly finds himself getting side-tracked by different scenarios and other characters.

The Second idea I came up with was a parody on the story of the birth of Christ and the virgin Mary. I wanted to follow an ‘Anti-Christ’ theme with this story, and instead of it being very biblical in the way the story was told I wanted the genre to be more sci-fi based with the main character perhaps being born as an alien.

The Final idea, which was easily my favourite of the three, came from me wanting to develop a group of friends who were all supernatural beings, all wishing to fit in amongst humans in a very human setting when they themselves were monsters. I have a fascination with classic monsters and their origin stories and have in the past tried to come up with character designs based on characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and Wolfman, but nothing ever came of these ideas that weren’t really even put onto paper. From the original idea of a group of supernatural friends in a human world, somehow, I was reminded of Scooby-Doo and I was led into thinking that it would be interesting to almost parody this classic cartoon series by having the main characters faced with a mystery of some sorts that they are trying to solve.