Jack and his Brother - Introduction + Background design

At the beginning of the year we were set an external brief set by Janie Grace, who is a board member of the Plymouth College of Art. It is meant for a Youtube channel for children called "Jack and his Brother". It will include collaborations of many different artists each doing different things. For this particular brief we had the option of making short animations (10 to 30 seconds) either on the topic of weather or puzzles.    

We were put in teams as this brief was part of our "studio practice" module which aims to support the ethos of studio culture and to teach us to work in a professional way, use effective workflow systems and meet deadlines. I was in a team with Ra'ees and Tim. Ra'ees and I had worked well together before and we are quite good at bouncing ideas off each other. We both really wanted to work with Tim because we really like his work and didn't get a chance to work with him last year. My job role was background designer, CelAction rigger and of course animator and we chose the topic of weather. 

I'm always pretty excited to get external briefs and this looked like a cool idea, especially because I like the age range that this was for. I believe between 7 and 11 is when all the fun stuff happens, so after we split off into tems I was quick to put a moodboard together. I love moodboards. 

 

It was really interesting to have to put myself in the mind-set of a 9year old. To help with that we did some research into what is currently popular with children of that age group. We of course used the google search engine but we also went to the Plymouth art school where we talked to a lot of the children about what shows they like to watch and what games they like to play. While there were some odd one outs (holly oaks, really?) a lot of them mentioned minecraft and adventure time. I can definitely relate to the latter. I am a huge fan of Calvin and Hobbes and that comic was the first thing that came to my mind and was a running theme for me in designing the backgrounds.

Initially, the idea involved having a handmade set onto which we would composite the animation. While doing some research on how to build the set, I found this O2 commercial and thought it would be a great little set to build

 

 

This idea was dropped later on mostly due to my struggles with time management as I was also working on another project where I had to build a set. So while I don’t think the idea on its own was over-ambitious, I think it just couldn't work with all the other projects going on.

In the end the background was changed to just being and illustration so our animation would not be mixed media anymore. This changed the tone of the story because it made us completely drop the idea of it being set on a stage. We initially had a much bigger idea involving breaking the worth wall and having a theatre intorduction at the beginning. Realising that this was too much made us condense the story and focus more on the main plot.

I drew this first sketch in my sketchbook to get an idea of the staging and the sort of colours we would go for. I had no intention of using coloured pencils in the final stages but it was an easy way to experiment with colours. I also wanted colouring to be in my mind from the beginning as I felt it was a very important thing to consider for a children’s animation, which are often very colourful. 

 This was the second sketch I made, which comes a lot closer to the end product:

As the character designs were going through stages of hand drawn to digitally painted, back to hand painted, I had to consider similar things with the background. I only focused on the rain background at the time because I thought that if I got it right for one scene, the other one would simply follow the same look. this turned out to be true but the other way around, as I ended up finalising the look on the winter background first.

At first I used photoshop to colour one of the versions which I had hand-drawn in my sketchbook. I was quite pleased with the result but I still wanted to try a hand painted version, especially because that was what we were trying to do with the character designs.

Photoshop

Hand painted

I wasn’t very happy with the hand coloured version as it looks quite flat but I also didn’t think the digital version quite worked. Even when I darkened it and added some puddles, it still wasn’t quite what we were looking for.

Meanwhile I worked on the first iteration of the animatic for the rain scene, using Storyboard pro for the first time. I enjoyed that a lot. It was a great program to use to produce a good animatic in a short time span. This is the animatic:

At this point, we got feedback from our lecturer Jess Davies about the story and the characters and it was decided that changing the stories to contain both characters instead of one character per story was a better idea than making one story per character. Furthermore she recommended us to do more work on the background as the painted aesthetic was generally considered stronger.

Because more of the character assets were ready for the winter scene, as well as the story being stronger and clearer, I moved on to working on the background for the winter scene. I decided to try out the software called MyPaint, which is very good at creating a hand painted look but works best on linux, so I had to use my own laptop.

One of my inspirations was this image:

I love the use of negative space and the way the image really focuses the eye on the characters.

This was what I made:

Both of these iterations were met with positive feedback. However we all agreed that the first one was stronger as it makes more interesting use of negative space.

I moved on to do some CelAction tests to see if I could layer the backgrounds if necessary.

We didn’t end up needing to do that for the final animation but it was still helpful, as I learned more about display orders in Celaction and would need to do something similar for the rain scene.

I also still preferred the tree from the second version so I created a 3rd version:

I was very happy with working in MyPaint for these background so I decided to do the same thing for the rain scene.

The first iteration was met with very poritive feedback and I only had to do a few changes for the final version.

I also did a version from a different angle: