In Week 9 of AN, we explored the concept of movement and I drew a mind map exploring a few different options before settling on the idea of characters leaving pieces of themselves behind as they move through the world. A happy character would leave behind flowers and a sad character would leave behind puddles. Although this was a relatively simple concept I decided it would work well if I added the two into a series of scenes together thus creating a storyboard.
The story is about a friendship between two that goes like this; A little boy leaves flowers as he drags his friend who’s stumbling along leaving sad puddles along the way. But the flowers die soon after they leave the boy. The boy sees this and cries making the flower coming out of him come out broken and wilted. The puddle boy “waters” the flowers with his sadness and they grow bigger and happier than before
I ended up making a final animation to demonstrate the entire story in a single scene. I struggled a lot with my perfectionism and reluctance to see a piece that does not meet up to my standards. No matter how many times I tried to redo this I'm not quite happy with it. Which is a shame since I really liked the concept.
I was inspired by the works of meyoco who regularly meshes objects into characters as if they were a part of them. Though my work only shows a single object per character, while her’s incorporates many objects, I feel as if I communicated emotions through character’s movements and the movements of objects that signify that emotion quite well.
I found Understanding Animation by Paul Wells an interesting and helpful read because it talked about the narrative implications when designing a character. inspired by this, I definitely referenced the story quite directly in my work of thesevanimated character prototypes
#kaykay #kkanfolio2
