Expressions Project

Initial character designs:

Favourite initial/developed character designs:

Storyboards:

Final Animatic:

Art style preview render

I intended the project to be 2D hand-drawn with digital colouring and CG backgrounds. The CG trees, bench, and bin are all royalty-free 3D models from www.turbosquid.com, but the rest I modelled myself. (In the final animation I would have re-modelled everything in more detail and replaced the royalty-free elements with my own models, but eventually I dropped the CG backgrounds altogether because I didn't have the time to recreate and animate them.)

Some peer feedback informed me that the setting was too dark, so I shifted it to daytime. I still wanted to keep a bit of a gloomy, scary atmosphere though, so I made sky grey and cloudy.

I am very proud of this project as my first big triumph in traditional hand-drawn animation, but if I had to improve upon it I would have drawn more frames to make it smoother, I would have done the monster in hand-drawn animation as well instead of puppet warp, I would have found an easier/quicker way to do the colouring, and I would have added lighting effects, just like my preview renders.