Truro Cathedral Project

For the Cornish stories project my group chose to animate to the soundtrack of a fisherman talking about a day of fishing. I established the role of character designer/character animator within the group and began by designing the main character.

We originally intended to use a soundtrack in which a fisherman kills fish with a screwdriver so I designed this as an early piece of concept art;

 I designed the fisherman in this sketchy, illustrative style as I thought it would appeal to young children. I used a muted colour palate so that the animation would have a rustic, naturalistic feel that I thought would compliment the story, I was cautious about not using too many bold black lines and garish, bright colours as I thought it would make the animation look cheap and unprofessional.

Having decided on a different soundtrack I began designing a new fisherman, some underwater backgrounds and the boat for the project;

The fisherman in the sound file is very relaxed and nonchalant and I thought that drawing him looking constantly bored would add some humor to the animation. I based the character on the old fisherman I see at harbors when I go sailing in Scotland, I originally wanted him to look very old and withered but I simplified drawing so that it would be easier to draw repeatedly when animated. I decided to draw him with a pipe constantly in his mouth as it adds to his stereotypical nautical persona but I did not draw any smoke coming out of the pipe as Truro cathedral probably doesn’t want to encourage smoking. The pipe also worked well as a prop as the fisherman could move it around in his mouth when thinking and it drops to the floor when he is surprised.

The images below are some concept drawings I did of the fishing boat and a background concept for under the sea;

 

Having assigned roles within the group I produced a colour palette for everyone to use, I felt it was important that the whole animation had the same style and look. I then began creating concept art for certain scenes so we could begin planning layouts and storyboarding, for one scene the camera pans to a shot of a crowded area under the sea so I drew the picture below as an idea for one of the jokes; the idea was to have as many famous fish from other animations as possible in one shot although this shot was not used in the final production as it breeched the copyrights of several franchises.

Instead I drew up a series of visual jokes based around the fish being underwater, the idea was to go for the scattershot approach and have so many ridiculous characters that every time the audience watched the animation they noticed something new. Below is a selection of the fish sketches that I gave to Jake Teale to colour;

 

 

At one point in the animation the camera pans across to an area that the fisherman says contains no fish, we wanted a there to be something funny under the water to liven up the scene so I did a drawing of an extremely ugly mermaid smoking a cigarette, I used the same colours as the mermaid from the Disney film “The Little Mermaid” and drew it in a similar pose to a still from the film;

 

Another scene in which I was required to create a series of funny visuals was the scene in which the fisherman arrives at his “secret spot” to find that it is already overcrowded with other boats. The original idea was to have several boats with the similar looking fisherman onboard but we instead decided to have several boats containing various caricatures of nautical stereotypes. Alex Watkins drew the background and the boats and I drew the various characters over the top, for the scene we decided to use limited animation and jut have a few of the characters blinking to add some movement to the scene. Aboard the boats I drew a gnome fishing, a pirate, a sponge (as a homage to Sponge Bob Square-pants), a naval captain and his first mate and Titanic II drifting towards an ice cube. I tried to make the drawings recognisable without plagarising.

My next task was to animate and colour the fisherman in all the characters scenes; I began by drawing out the keyframes for each scene, I would then draw the inbetweens and then go back and colour each frame. Below are the key poses from a yawn sequence;

 

The original plan was to animate the project in Toon Boom although we eventually decided that because of the small amount of animation required it would be easier to draw the frames in sketchbook pro or photoshop and then animate them in flash. The project was composited by Alex Watkins using Adobe Premiere and much of the animation was achieved using symbols rather than frames.

For some of the scenes I drew the foreground where very little or no animation was needed (the petrol station pump, the fisherman rolling up his sleeve to look at his watch, the sun and moon), a few of the scenes I drew were eventually cut from the animation including the scene below in which a seagull looks round;

 

I found that the most challenging aspect of the project was drawing animating a 2D character for the 3D projection mapping of the boat; I drew a series of turn-arounds for the character at the beginning of the project and I used these as a reference when drawing the character from several different angles. Animating the character was also a very tedious process as I chose to draw the frames in Sketchbook Pro using the layer as an onion-skinning tool, although the process worked it meant that the frames had to be saved and catalogued every time a drawing was finished. I think if I was going to work on a similar project again I would make sure someone else had the job of colouring the frames as having to both draw and colour the frames significantly slowed down my workflow.

I really enjoyed working on the project and I would like to work on a 2D animation again.