Final major Project Proposal
Rationale
My idea is to create a 2D animation of one of my original characters transforming into a dragon. One of the reasons I want to do this is to practice my 2D animation skills, and to learn and master the Adobe animate software further. I want to take up something relatively simple in the sense of process but challenging in the sense of production. By the end of this project I want to feel more comfortable using the adobe Animate, Photoshop and After effects software.
Project Concept
The idea is to use one of my original characters in order to show the transformation from a person to a dragon by using 2D Frame by Frame (cel) animation. The character belongs to a world where part of its population can turn into a dragon. This ability and the type of the dragon are passed down with DNA and are extremely likely to be inherited by the offspring, however, there are exceptions where the child can be a mixed dragon if its parents are different types, or it can mutate and have slightly different looks and power, and in some very rare cases, the ability to become a dragon has not been inherited. The Dragons are divided into 6 classes – Water, Fire, Air, Earth, Light and Darkness (the latter two also known as Day and Night), and each has few sub-classes, also referred as breeds.
I am planning to make the animation at least 30 seconds to 1 minute long. I do not want to make it too long since I'm planning on colouring the animation, preferably all frames, as well as adding sound effects to it. I want to add the sound effects to the animation using Adobe After effects. I added audio to Adobe animate once, and in order to hear it I had to start from the first frame and play it, and if I stopped it and play it again I wasn’t able to hear it unless I started from the beginning. I am not sure how this will work out in adobe AE, which means I will have to research and try it, to see if there is any difference.
In addition, I’m going to add backgrounds, which will be done in Adobe Photoshop. They will be l be the same location just different angles. Since I still haven’t produced a clear storyboard, I am not sure what angles I will need in particular. I plan to have decided on the character and a storyboard before starting anything major.
In addition to this, I plan to do a little information sheet on the chosen character, more as a guide for myself than anything else.
Evaluation
I do understand that the production could become very challenging once I get to the colouring aspect of the animation, as well as adding any type of audio as I'm quite inexperienced with that which means that I will need good research and preparation as well as few practice tries.
There is also the potential risks that I wouldn’t be able to finish, the animation or the colouring, as both processes take very long time and lots of patience and there are any delays, for example I used up too much time on looking for an audio or if I wasn’t happy with one aspect of the animation and went back to fix it on the expense of something else I had as a target for the day, that could very much effect my work in a not so positive way. To prevent that I must set specific targets for the week or each day, and in case I’m not finished with any of the targets I will need to leave that for later and move on. I tent to leave important work for later which then piles up and I am left doing crazy amounts of work for a short time, and ofter that has bad effect on my work and puts me in a stressful situation, that I would like to avoid in this project.
To further help my understand what can have effect on my work, I think of looking back at older projects and going through the pages to see what went wrong back then and what I could improve to make his project better.
Sketches/Drawings/designs
To choose a character/ dragon for the animation I decided to do a pole, and go around the classroom asking my classmates and teachers which dragon they prefer. For the majority of the characters I had their human design but not their dragon one, so I was left with only 4 final dragon designs to include in the poll.
Also I included couple of sketches where I was experimenting with dragon designs, and practising dragon anatomy, especially the wings, as I have been struggling to draw them, for a long time.
Character designs
Here I have some character designs, all potential characters that I could use for the project. they are also an example of what style I plan to work in.
I had the characters in mind but I needed to bring them to life by looking up and researching, on what style they have as I closely relate that to their personality. I usually have an idea of how I want them to look like, but I need a clear reference or an inspiration in order to make it correct.
This is how my designing process looks like. I look up the style or the person that I associate my character with and then try out the style in few different ways to see if it fits the character.
Fanart
A fanart I did of one of my favourite characters from the anime "Jojo's Bizzare Adventure". I didn't want to draw the reference image exactly as it was, so I searched for a reference pose from Pinterest. I referenced the colours from the character image, and the dramatic shading in some areas.
On the left side, I put the reference image for the pose, and on the right side, the initial sketch was done with a blue colour pencil for the general shape, and pink pencil for the clothes, hair and accessories (the pencils are quite bright and are not quite visible in the image).
I used those two colours as they don't leave messy marks, which would happen if I was using a regular graphite pencil.
Wing animation Test
This is a quick animation I did to test how I am going to animate the wings of my dragon character if I need to.
To help me with the animation, I looked at some slow motion videos of birds taking off, and some frames of bats flying, which I will add to my Research at some point, to support my animation.
The character and the place
The Character
The character I decided to use for the animation is Sunny, a fire type dragon. His powers are obviously breathing fire while he is both human and dragon form.
He has a very generic appearance while in human form, there is nothing that suggests he is a dragon at first sight. He has light skin with deep green eyes and dark brown hair. Personality-wise, he is just as his name suggests - generally a very happy, caring and bright. However, he does have a hidden, more dark side that just scares everyone around him, as they don't expect him to act in such a way, considering he very rarely acts that way and is mostly a cheerful kid.
As for the dragon form I made him be a fire dragon. Again quite generic but that is the whole point. His dragon for appearance I similar to that of magma that is cooling down, the outside surface is the one to cool down so it turns back into solid-state.
So basically the body of the dragon is like ever-burning lava covered by the cooled down ashy coloured layer. This was inspired by one of the fire wolfs from the show "Adventure time". I really liked the idea, and I thought it suits what I wanted to do with the dragon design so I adopted the idea by just making the outer layer ashy grey as I mentioned.
THE BACKGROUND
The site where the transformation takes place is a casino called "The Lucky 13" (the owner of the casino, Mammon, loves superstitious tricks on the expense of his customers, as much as he loves oximorous phrases.
The architecture of the building is called Baroque, (which flourished from early 17th century until 1740s), and it is also a style of music, dance, painting, sculpture and other arts. It is a highly decorative and theatrical style. What I liked the most was the subtle and fine details, and since it was originally introduced by the catholic church, which explains the style's close resemblance to the ancient Rome's architecture and arts, as the Catholic church originated from the Holy Roman Empire.
The images that I decided to use as a reference and inspiration fro the "The Lucky 13" is called Castle Howard located in North Yorkshire. I remember watching "Garfield 2" and admiring the castle and its interior.
I haven't done any sketches of the background yet in order to compare them with the reference, however this is to justify what I want for my background.
the pitch
The class as a whole put this spider diagram together in order to determine what we may need for the pitch of the FMP. For me the most important is to have a clear idea of what I want to produce by the end of the project, and with that I will be able to plan out my weeks better. Knowing what I want to make will help me more organised.
Also for me, it is very important to have references to help me with my idea, initial research that sets the whole project in motion. My idea is to animate the transformation of a person to a dragon. I plan to use one of my original characters that I have worked on for a long time. So the first thing I looked at was examples of transformation.
In the end, I didn't get to pitch my idea, since the day I was supposed to I wasn't feeling well and I had to miss that day. In my evaluations, I wrote more about how this issue progressed and evaluated its impact, however simply put I never got to pitch my idea so my tutor Mike suggested that I put my pitch on the website and gave me this question to think about and write down:
What are your inspirations?:
My inspirations for this project are the different types of transformations in cartoons. I want to understand how they work, as I know transformation can be tricky to animate and to animate it well. I added a bunch of gifs of transformations to my pitch, transformations that I really liked and will analyze further.
What do you want to learn during this project?:
I want to master more of the features available in Adobe Animate. That way I will have more confidence using it in the future, which will allow me to go more ambitious with my ideas and future projects.
I have always been struggling with good detailed planning and organisation. I am hoping that this project will help me develop these skills further, and make them a habit, as they are very important in the workplace and everyday life, in order to have completed tasks successfully.
What will you research into?:
Firstly I plan to research into transformations. They don't have to be dragon ones but just general transformations that I think look interesting. I need inspiration for the transformation since I still don't know how I want it to look. I think I have an idea of how I want it to look but I will need to look up some examples to come with an interesting transformation.
Looking up the 12 Principles of animation is something I should have done a long time ago since in a way they are the basic rules of animation, and I have done 4 projects with animations as a final piece and still haven't looked them up, and now is the perfect time to do so!
I will definitely need some kind of reference for the first scene in my storyboard. I am sure that I won't be able to be to find a reference for such a specific camera movement, which means I will have to get it myself. I plan to ask one of my friends or classmates to be my model for the scene.
Below is my pitch for this project: