I think I prefer the old and sketchyer version as the cleaned up attempt seems to have lost its character a little?
NEW:
OLD:
Will be posting up old storyboards, character and font designs as well as the completed animation in the next few days.
A few days later...(02/05/11)
To begin with I was a little confused about who this Katie character was and which angle to take the animation. I started doing some drawings of her in different costumes and different roles such as Band player(see with 'Katie' and musical notes coming from her trumpet), lion tamer/ circus leader, and a painter/ decorator which I quite liked the idea of with the website in painted letters on a billboard. At that time the company was under the name 'Yorbrand'.
Later there was the suggestion that it should be set at Halloween so I was to focus on snazzy and jazzed up costumes to put her in (such as the cat and ghoul outfits).
Katie is meant to be the fun, vibrant selling point of the company so there had to be contrasting characters or brands which are alot more un-appealing and dull (black and white). Again, a few teething problems and experimenting with styles so heres some rejects as well as the successful characters which were used in the beginning of the ad. I particularly like my onion-faced kid on the 1st row. Some of these were seen as too elaborate and quirky looking which would take the focus from Katie so they were rightfully rejected. This was probably the funnest part next to animating.
Once we established it would be a halloween theme I started playing with text that we might use and some background characters for the grand finale. I didnt end up using any of this as we dropped the name Katie and the focus would be on jamesvonleyden.com.
I loved this guy and wished I had time and reason to add him into the final animation but it would have taken alot of time to animate him and add other characters in so he didnt seem out of place.
This is aweful storyboarding but James seemed to understand where I was going with it. We lost the pumpkin goo which I though would be a cool way to spell out the 'www.' and Katie present the branding name with her spells etc. Theres alot we kept and alot that got cut out from these simple doodles which I used more as a map for what the animation would look like.
These were some more early development drawings but I kept the idea of writing on the back of her wings in the final animation only it displayed the words 'Trick or Treat' instead of Katie. We also lost her cat outfit incase the audience got confused but added cats in instead to juggle pumpkins.
Early bat design (didnt like the colours here at all)
As you can see the old storyboard fared me well with the transformation from Witch to bat costume in the final cut. I made sure the design would enable me to nicely metamorphasise between these two costumes i.e the bat-wing skirt becomes her wings and her hat is squashed into ears as she performs her cartwheel.
This was probably my favourite part of the animation. I checked out different videos on Youtube for cartwheels and backflips. I mostly liked adding the delayed actions/ long inbetweens in the arms and legs as they move in their arcs; it makes for interesting stills as well as less inbetween drawings in the animation process.
These are the simply animated background elements used in the 'finale' of the ad. I used 4-5 Bat frames, one facing forewards and one taken from a side view. Before Katie releases the magic she flips into position between two cats juggling pumpkins;the movement of which I took from footage of guys juggling from Youtube. I coloured and duplicated the bat frames and placed them all over the screen to make it look as though she had released them by magic. I also rotated, skewed and animated the stars and puffs (shown as separate PNGs) to make it seem more magical.
More to come soon!
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