Pre-Production (ANI3)

For our new module, pre-production, we must explore all the different tasks that you must do before you begin animating. We have been given the freedom to come up with anything we like, whether we continue to animate it after doing all the pre-production is another question. But I did however struggle with this freedom - to be told we can produce an animation based on anything we want was daunting to me and I didn't even know where to begin. So I decided to grab a scarp piece of paper and a couple of chunky pens and I just wrote down any ideas that popped into my head. Whether it be styles that I like or might want to try, or a potential story line, I just jotted it down and made a big mess of ideas.

After jotting down the usual things like my love of colour and texture, I started to think about how I needed some sort of narrative, otherwise this whole mind map would be pointless. So I thought about all the cool animations I saw online over International Women's Day and began to think "I wonder if there's anything like that coming up around the deadline."

And so, I wrote down the deadline date (May 21st) and got to googling. I found some potential ideas including World Laughter Day, World Oceans Day and World Environment Day, before stumbling across International Children's Day. Now, I have since learnt from my mistakes, but Wikipedia told me that this was on the 1st of June. I have since found out it's in November, but that's ok - I can still start pre-producing things for it now.

I remember seeing a video online a while back of an illustrator sitting down with kids and asking them "what do you want to be when you grow up?" and some of the answers were absolutely brilliant. The illustrator then sketched the kids in their future jobs and it looked like great fun.

This got me thinking - what if I ask children some questions such as "what do you want to be when you grow up?" and "what do you think of grown ups?" and record their answers. I can then use these recordings and animate their thoughts. And hopefully they'll come up with some crazy answers that will be fun to animate.

I also thought about how I love the use of bright colours and textures in my work and began to think maybe I can tie this in with quite a childish manner of animating. I could use textures that kids may be familiar with such as wax crayons and colouring pencils, and I could use bright colours that may appeal to them. Here's some inspiration by an illustrator called Daria Solak:

So my next steps are to get some recordings of children answering my questions, in the hopes that they'll give me some crazy and fun answers. Following that I can get some character designs down, do some storyboarding and then an animatic.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how this turns out!

Amy