Planning
The Production Schedule
The character
I did drawings of 2 of my characters, in 3 different styles that I consider using, The first one I called chibi where the proportions a arranged so they make the characters look cute. The second one the proportions are cartoonish and closely resemble the ones of shows like "Hazbin Hotel"( maybe a bit smaller but similar), the 3rd one is a style that I usually use, closely resembling anime style.
In the end, I stuck with a style that is somewhat between the 2nd and the 3rd one, now resembling the Hazbin Hotel proportions more. With the sketch on the left, I want to show how the emergence of the wing is going to look like
For the transformation I decided to go with something similar to the American Dragon and the Steven universe transformations, however in my version, the wings and tail will form separate from the rest of the body. A plasma like substance will emerge from the areas where the wings and the tail will be. After the plasma reaches a particular size (that will eventually be the size of the wings and tail that will form after wards) the plasma will start to "dissolve" and from underneath, steady the wings and the tail will become visible.
Once the wings and the tail were solved I moved on to the rest of the body and how I am going to present the transformation. It is going to be similar to the Steven universe gem reformation, where the character turns into a light silhouette and the transformation takes place. The body slowly loses its outlines and colour and turns into a "light silhouette" that also becomes bigger and changes form.
* Transformation of the limbs and the rest of the body*
*A drawing of Sunny's transformation having stopped midway. Dragons can halt their transformation at any point and can end up with having their legs or arms transformed but their general body still being human and being the same size*
A drawing of chibi dragons. Sunny's dragon form on the left, and Kayser (his brother) on the right.
Character design change
When I was working on the designing of the character for the pitch, I rushed and I came up with something that I thought wasn't matching the character's personality. After some time and some sketching, I came up with a design that I was much happier and that I feel suits the character.
Old design
This time I had time to put more thought into the design. I was inspired by Michael Jackson's jacket from the official clip for the song "Thriller".
New design
I wanted to keep Sunnys curly hair, but I wanted a design that would both look nice and will be easy to draw. I really like Prince's hairstyle from the beginning of The Revolution. I tried to achieve something similar.
I went experimental with the trousers. I didn't have any particular inspiration, I just thought turquoise would look nice with the jacket and I showed it to my household and peers and they approved the choice
These were just boots that I saw and I really liked them.
After this design change, I felt much more comfortable and confident in drawing the character. I am very happy with how he turned.
The storyboard
Version 1.5
This is the storyboard I put together after the pitch. I had a storyboard prepared for the pitch, which I will change over the course of the project.
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This storyboard has significantly fewer frames compared to the original. I changed up the scenes where Sunny turns into a dragon completely. When I did the original storyboard I didn't know how the transformation will look like, so I just had to add something just to begin with.
I am really hyped for the first scene where the camera zooms in to the character while rotation to the side, which is why I kept it in the new story board. The whole storyboard is quite similar to the one I had for the pitch as I kept many of the scenes the same and just made it quite basic.
Version 2.0
Now, with this storyboard, I really took my time to draw it and put it together. I couldn't colour it in because my markers can be seen on the next page, and I already drew on that page, however, I tried to go as clear as possible with this version.
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This version, is quite similar to the 1.5 version, with only one major scene being changed. The original and 1.5 version showed the wings of the character emerging from a side view. This one, however, shows the from the back.
I made this change in order to show both wings emerging clearly and to add some diversity to the camera views since most scenes are shown from a side view.
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Now I wanted to be very specific with this storyboard and make it as if its frames work like key poses, in order to be as clear and detailed, as possible about each motion.
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I went especially detailed with the scene where the tail has to materialise. I wanted to have a clear physical guide to help me animate this scene.
I did a few sketches of the background, mostly just practising perspective drawing.
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This one above is a two-point perspective of the castle. I was looking at Castle Howard as a reference of course. It is quite a simple sketch but I am quite happy with the accuracy and how the perspective looks. This background will not be part of the final animation because I don't have an angle view like this one in my storyboard.
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While still working on the animation it because quite obvious I won't be able to add the backgrounds to the animation because I had made the mistake of starting with the character animation first and then thinking about the background.
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My original plan with the backgrounds was to do2-3 backgrounds and the reuse them for scenes that were of a similar angle because I had a couple of scenes sharing quite similar angles ( the beginning of scene 1 and then the whole scene 4, and then the end of scene 1 and the whole scene 5). But again I did the mistake of starting with the character animation first.
the background
This is a one-point perspective drawing for scene 2. Since has a back view I had to think how the front would look. To help I looked at the photos of Castle Howard again and sketched this. I am quite happy with how this worked out it is quite simple but I didn't want it to be too crowded anyway.
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I am not the best in backgrounds simply because I haven't had enough practice. And on top of that, I have very little time to produce the backgrounds. Because of that, I decided not to because a background could make or break an animation, and I feel that in my case quickly produced backgrounds would ruin an already good animation.