I'm a little uncertain of what I want to do for IoL this semester, but I know I want to focus on character animation and my ongoing visual novel project. These storyboards were my attempt at brainstorming a concrete idea to follow.
Currently, I'm split between two main ideas:
- Animate a short cutscene for my game. Since I've never done a full animation before (only the occasional sprite animation), it could be a good way to familiarise myself with the process. I like the idea of focusing on a very short, almost mundane scene, that establishes something about the game's characters, and how they feel about each other and their odd circumstances.
- Find ways to animate the cashier's dialog sprites to be more lively. Since she's the only character the player interacts with in the game, this would give me an excuse to experiment with gesture, fluidity, lighting, etc. Like, just really go to town in terms of presentation.
(To be extra clear: I'm not planning on doing both. Just... picking one or the other, and really focusing on that.)
I worked on my moodboard alongside these storyboards, so the focus kind of... drifted, halfway through. Initially I started out by looking at games and animations that used body language extensively, as I was thinking of ways to make the Cashier more expressive. This takes up the first half of the moodboard; Tangle Tower and Ace Attorney use incredibly detailed character animations to make their characters more lively, both for comedic and dramatic effect. Classic cartoons (especially Hanna-Barbera, Looney Toons, etc) really play around with exaggeration on body language and expression; and while they're possibly a little too exaggerated for this particular project, there's still underlying principles I can steal.
Later, my focus drifted into "establishing character moments" from all forms of media and how they quickly convey information about a character's mood and place in the world. Examples include: Paranatural using a bait-and-switch to establish a ghost as non-threatening, Good Morning using overlaid animations to indicate how exhausted a character is at any point in her daily routine, Fargo's casual body language and dialog indicating that the extreme violence isn't unusual for the character's jobs, and Sam & Max establishing a friendly-yet-violent rivalry by throwing someone out a window so they can't answer the phone.
