I'm not used to story development but I hoped I could form some ideas from character design and development. As I mentioned in my presentation, I am interested in the idea of referencing from life to create interesting characters. I'm also interested in exaggerating the features of my characters a bit more, and finding a balance between caricaturing and representational drawing when designing.
I used an opportunity during a lecture the other day to do an observational study of another student in the room, as reference for a potential character that I could elaborate on. I didn't know this person either so could more or less interpret them freely, imagining a new personality, mannerisms or characteristics.
I was quite interested in the result so I continued with some more concepts at home, I also tried out a little few thumbnail line tests of her, creating a scenario with her umbrella and a gust of wind.
Please click here to view thumbnail test
I decided to play around with the idea of this girl become our main character for the animation exercises and I thought she could have a dog. To make things interesting, I figured she could have a huge dog like a great rather than a small one one like the earlier concept i had done. This way we'd be left to create some interesting scenarios where her dog is really hard to control and ends up walking her - mix that up with some rain and we might just have an animation.
Just as a contrasting character, I thought about maybe including a big guy with a really small dog, who perhaps doesn't know his own strength, which results in his dog getting pulled about quite a bit. Though I was struggling to think of a scenario in which these two could create a narrative together, whilst including the 5 animation exercises. The most problematic exercise so far is the ball throwing exercise - Animate a character throwing a ball up in the air, which unexpectedly returns heavy. (There's little logical possibilities for this scenario in my opinion)
As a group, we had decided we needed to come up with a working idea sooner rather than later as Bev had now made a more detailed work schedule, which we all hope to stick to. By the end of the week we really wanted to be sharing and reviewing ideas on character and scenarios, along with either a written synopsis or a rough storyboard of a narrative to work with.
At this stage, I was really struggling to come up with a good narrative for these characters I had, and had nothing down on paper. I'd been brewing over rough ideas but only in my head - I figured that if the narrative for the animation exercise wasn't working in my head, then theres not much use putting any thing down on paper.
After a few days I still had nothing, and was getting frustrated. But not too long ago, Lewys had given me a disc with a series of story boarding tutorials by Kris Pearn (a former Storyboard artist in Television) and I remember that his tutorials had suggested to just get something down and almost make the story up as you go along. So I gave it a shot, but decided to do it with a new character, mainly because I had little enthusiasm left for the others.
It seemed to work quite well and I had even come up with a solution for the ball exercise.
Unfortunately by the time I was due to share this idea the next day, it was still incomplete, and I didn't quite have an ending for it.
Rough Character design and opening/establishing shot.
When we all shared our ideas, Bev seemed to have the strongest and most complete narrative about a mime which we all liked and were keen to develop and refine.
Since I was quite fond of this man and his dog idea, I decided to have a go at writing it up to help finish it. This may help explain most of the rough storyboard panels above
Beginning
Old Man walking his dog to the park from his house or back from the park walking home. It starts to rain and the man stops to put his hood up then continues walking. But the dog doesn’t like the rain so he pulls on the lead unexpectedly the other way to sit under a tree out of the rain.
Middle: Conflict
The man can’t get the dog to move. The man pulls out a tennis ball to bribe the dog. The dog is interested - So the man goes to throw the ball but it lands in a tree and gets stuck. The man slaps his forehead cursing his stupid throw and goes to try and get the ball back. With a retractable lead, he extends it as far as he can to get to the tree that the ball is stuck in, whilst his dog stays put.
He takes his hood down and starts to shake the small tree to retrieve the ball. Suddenly, a cat falls out the tree instead, screeching whilst falling with its claws out. The cat desperately grips on to the old man’s ball head anxiously. The man screams in pain and struggles to get the cat off him. His dog starts barking in the distance as he struggles and the bark gets louder and louder.
Ending
His dog reaches the scene, suddenly jumping on the man to get at the cat. The cat jumps off avoiding the dog and runs to escapes. The dog jumps down from the man to chase the cat off. During all the commotion, the dogs lead has tangled up in around the mans leg and he is swept off his feet. He grabs on to the tree to avoid getting dragged away. The lead snaps and the tree roils slightly, releasing the ball which hits the man on the head on the way down and bounces away. The man is completely disorientated. The rain slows to a stops and his dog returns to the man with the ball in his mouth and drops it to his feet.
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