After reading the project brief I decided to start by designing the two characters I would be using for for the two sequences. I started off by painting some magenta human-like shapes in my sketchbook using watercolour paint and after letting it dry I went back in with some black watercolour to draw in details. I ended up turning the shapes into a girl with a poofy low bun hairstyle and wearing a shirt with a black tie. Initially I was planning to have her be the sad character who drinks a good cup of coffee and the attire was supposed to suggest that she was a stressed office worker however this plan changed not long after. Despite this, I decided to keep the outfit as it was. After doing the initial page, I decided to do a second page in order to explore the different hairstyles I could give her. I used the same process as for the first page in order to create the second, using hairstyle references from sites such as Pintrest as inspiration. I considered using the hairstyle on the top right or the double low buns hairstyle below it however in the end I stuck with the original low bun. At this point I also started thinking about the composition and angles of the shots I would be using for the project so I did a couple more quick doodles of the girl.
Afterwards I continued by brainstorming ideas for the second character. I wanted to create contrast between the two characters which is why I decided to design an elderly man. As with the girl character, I started by painting some shapes with watercolour and then adding more detail after it dried. Instead of using magenta as last time, I decided to use yellow/orange for the base to suggest a difference in the characters' moods. Yellow/Orange is generally viewed as a happy colour and in the first plan the elderly man was supposed to be the happy character who becomes sad so I thought it would be fitting. I experimented with different beards, hairstyles, moustaches, accessories, etc in there two pages and eventually settled with the design that can be seen in the third page. The plan was to have him be quite large and bulky to the point where he nearly takes up the whole screen to contrast the girl character. Due to him being an older character, I also thought that it would be better if he wasn't as expressive as the girl character so his sequence would focus a lot more on the smaller movements such as trembling hands, etc.
At this point I also began thinking about background ideas. I didn't want my characters to exist in an empty void which led me to drawing a couple of quick backgrounds using watercolour and paint markers. I didn't want to make the backgrounds too complicated as I felt like they would take the attention away from the characters so I looked at the backgrounds made for the original Powerpuff Girls series for inspiration. I really liked the lack of proper lineart and the use of flat colours so I tried to use those in my background drawings. After I still felt like they were too complicated for my liking so I used the third idea on the left as a base and simplified it even more to get the final result. The end of the week was also the point at which I decided to switch the two characters roles which resulted in my colour palette changing as I felt like using yellow/orange for the elderly man was now unfitting. I felt that simply showing the still image on the screen for a few seconds wasn't very interesting so later on I came up with the idea of making a simple 3 frame wiggle aniumation and adding a slow zoom to not only set the scene but to also catch the viewers attention.
To finish off the week, I started working on the storyboard. Instead of making two separate sequences I decided to make one long one. I filmed myself acting out several different entrances into the scene for both of the charcaters and eventually settled on two which I liked the most. I didn't spend too much time on actually drawing out the intro storyboard as I simply wanted to capture the general idea of what I wanted to animate when the time came. The idea I had was to set the scene through the zoom in and then introduce both of the characters one after another instead of focusing on only one for the first half of the sequence. This would also allow me to add in some very minor character interactions which I felt would make the sequence a bit less boring. After I ended up also doing a few more of the character drawings just for practice.
I had a few days left before the first tutorial so I spent that time drawing out a very quick storyboard for the girls' sequence. I used the exact same method as for the intro storuboard where I filmed myself acting out the whole sequence in different ways and after settling on one I drew it out in my sketchbook. I decided to keep the camera at a fixed position so that I could focus more on the body movements and facial expressions.
Overall I was quite pleased with all the work I produced over these two weeks and I think I had a good start on the project. I do think that I could have spent some more time developing the characters and maybe created proper character sheets however that is something I'll have to keep in mind for the next project.
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