video pilot

Heres a digitised version of the dance sequence, basicaly imagine it in paper craft!! We were talking before about how having a physical paper crafted version of this animation will add charm and a sense of realistic achievability to kids who would potentially be engaging with this animation in the later stages. Its working, and any jittery movement in the animatino in my opinion adds to the overall charm of the whole.

character colour schemes and expression, crowd and speakers

Me and ol selected from a variety of colour shcemes and went for the dark teal, we have also been expreimenting with simple facial expressions loosely based on the hand drawn object and character development in the earlier post. Also the crowd that we will use and the speakers, just to test movement in these initial production stages. We are most likely going to animate the speaker movement to the actual beat we use.

dance sequence and character final

heres the final development for our main character in our stop motion animation, just planning his positioning for how he will dance because this is the most important part of the animation.

Sketches to be vectorised for the flatpack/stop frame assets

The results of a quickfire image generating session to create some visuals for the potential flatpack of papercrafted items objects accessories and characters to be printed off from the cartoon network website and for kids to engage with and submit back to cartoon network as part of our concept idea "TV is doing."

Interim crit feedback

The second crit di go really well, and everybody understood our ideas and got excited about them, which is what we were hoping for. The ideas storyboard that the crit group liked best was storyboard B, so this is the idea we are running with. Along with this though, another idea was born out of this idea, which was we could produce like a net pack of all the props/ characters we use in the animation to go on the cartoon network website for kids to get hold of and make theselves, in the hope to make a little animation attempt and get it into the hall of fame!

pre crit storyboards

Storyboard A: initial idea taken to the first ideas pitch/ crit - wih tweaked idea and a variation on colour scheme. This idea is fine and would work as a standalone ident for cartoon network, because carrtoon network have housed idents like this in the past, But from the first crit the idea of interactivity was brought up and gave us something to consider and also tie into the plot for a weightier concept of - "T.V is doing."

This was the second variation of our intial idea with a what happens next/ consequences idea. Th idea is that the ad would play up until it says what happens next? In which conact info for cartoon network + submission details woul come on screen. This has been outlined in greater detail on the storyboard.
C - this board was born of me and ollie boucing ideas around pre - crit, and was also inspired by some of the videos in our research. We planned to take these three boards, along with our re-written and re- refined brief and also out developmental work to the second crit.

YCN cartoon network brief rejigged

conept ideas pitch

This was our concept pitch board, we were really happy with how the pitch whent for us, and i think had we not have gone first, I may not have been able to explain our design process including things like the problem, target audience and our ceonept, dont know about ollie but i would have fallen to bits because alot of other concept got picked to bits, but ours remained strong and unchanged, and all we got told was that we should really be taking this directly to our target audience, (being kids aged 6-11) So I have arranged this, it just needs to happen now!

during the actual presentation i tried to focus on explained our design rationale due to the problem identified and how it tied in with the restrictions on the brief and also our target audience. Ollie delt with the research and development side of the presentation, taking into account the target audience and existing animations and other things in place within the catroon network empire.

Final Storyboard

A tweaked version of your final idea, This probably will get tweaked but for now it does convey a clear idea of what we want to do, I've also been looking for sound effects and recording voice samples to go with this storyboard.

character design ideas.

just some silly character design ideas, we have been taking inspiration from foster's home for imaginary friends in terms of simplicity and also that cartoon networky feel. our final is mostly going to look like a hybrid of a few of these characters. We want our end protype to be unassuming, pretty stupid looking , fun loving and full of energy.

idea 5

This was an alternate storyboard for the blue peter style make in which the character speaks and says something amusing - the idea was the character was a turntable head so he could scratch his head, and chopped up samples would come out. would be fun to make, but probably a bit hard to understand for the younger end of our target audience.

idea 4

In this animation there is a blue peter style make scenario and a narrative that plays out post make, me and ollie were really keen on this idea because the narrative prior to the make almost signifies where the child takes it afterwards. At this stage, me and Ollie are persuing this idea.

idea 3

Dino Dot to dot! We decided to make a test based on this storyboard just to show the kind of mischievous feel we are going for - it does convey what we want to say but i feel our ideas need contextualising by a real group of kids - I have arranged a research visit to both my old schools,
This will be posted about in more detail when it has happened.
These were the other dot to dot ideas we were thikning about doing, again its playing on the idea of turning something relatively mundane into something zany by using your imagination.

idea 2

This is a randomiser themed animation, in where shapes get thrown into a bag, and after a shake a character of some sort comes out - this animation would work as a series by which a different character of crafted object comes out every time. I think this would work really well as a stop motion animation. because it is simple and crude looking - and this is the feel me and ollie are going for, as we have said from the beginning.

animation idea 1

This was the first idea for our animation, it shows how a mundane object can be made fun an interesting through the use of imagination and elbow grease. the initial idea for all these animations is that they will be produced using paper craft and stop motion - we were also toying with the idea of not using any print in the animations.

second test animation

Another one of our ideas put into a test animation - basically a guy fails at a dot to dot so he deviates and uses his mischievous sense of imagination. Its this sort of direction me and ol want to head in - using a sort of slapstick mischievous sense of craetive humour. the crude look of this animation really adds to this hand made feel I was talking about before - obviously to make this a smoother animation we would have to take alot more photos, but its a really nice example of future things to come!

Test animation

We put together a little stop frame of our paper crafted cat to give us an idea of what its like to actually put together an image sequence in after effects, the answer is, that its fun and as long as everything is in sequence - its a walk in the park. Its also a nice gauge of how much time we need to leave ourselves to put the animation together in the final stages. Here are the frames we used to produce this image sequence.

Nets made!

Here are the nets we made! In doing this I think we realised how much we should be respecting expert paper crafters a little more than we previously did. Paper craft is challenging and demands careful attention to produce successfully. It has definately helped us to plan for the aniations we will make as we now know how much time we need to put aside for the crafting of the assets for out animation.

The main thing for me and ollie in choosing the cartoon network brief is that we want to have fun with this brief because if we're having fun, it reflects in the final result of what we do - which will resonate with kids a hell of alot more than a really slick and hectic animation - as a kid i know i would have loved to see and take part in what me and ollie are doing now. I also always said as a kid i wanted to be an animator! Fun is the word, its been a very fun day!