Introduction

This blog post is the concept design for the animation that I am creating for the B2 Creative Project brief, focusing on the concept art, sketches and storyboards I have created for this project.

Sketches

This section is for the initial sketches I created to visualise my story ideas, as well as more refined pieces of concept art that I used to further envision the world of my animation, and using this as a basis for the final animation.

Here is the first sketch I created once I had decided on my idea. It shows the alien in my story, and the giant eye that lives inside of it. Creating a rough concept for the alien helped me to decide how it behaves and the way that I wanted it to look in the final animation.

The next sketch I did was of the main character’s crashed spaceship, another point of the story in my animation. Once again, creating a first concept for the spaceship helped me to decide how I wanted it to look in the final animation. The ship here looks more like an aeroplane, a look that I decided to move away from in future concept designs.

Concept Art

Below is a piece of concept art that I created to show what the inside of the giant alien could look like in my film. It shows a figure falling down after being eaten by the alien, which gives a sense of scale for how big the alien is compared to a human.

This is another piece of concept art below, showing a design for the main character wearing a spacesuit. I started by drawing the character’s figure, using my character moodboard as reference, and then colouring the design in black and white first as I wanted the designs to stand out in full colour and look distinctive. Then, I experimented with different combinations of colours that I could use for the design and compiled them together into this image. my favourite colour combinations are the orange and blue design, the red and purple, the red and black and the orange and black. I think the colours in the character design will ultimately help to define the visual style of the whole animation, which is why experimenting with different colours was so important to me.

Here is what that photoshop document looked like, with the moodboard on the right and the design which I used clipping masks and adjustment layers to edit and create the variations seen above.

The actual design is clearly astronaut inspired as I wanted to invoke some of the media that my animation is inspired by – Interstellar, 2001, the Martian, Armageddon – but with a more cartoonish and vibrant twist. The dome helmet and backpack are clearly the most distinct astronaut elements, the gloves are inspired by Spiderman’s web shooters, the boots are a mixture of astronaut and a more comic book style characters and the belt is a classic sci fi equipment belt seen on stormtroopers, mixed with a real climbing harness, as I thought about the practical use of the suit and how it would be used to explore alien worlds

For this next concept below, I combined a couple of my favourite looking designs with the background that I drew, just to see how the character might look against a backdrop, and if the design would stand out. I wasn’t sure if the red spacesuit would stand out as well compared to the orange spacesuit and when I made them both black and white I saw that the red suit stands out adequately from the background, but the orange is slightly more distinctive.

Storyboards

This section is for the story boards of my film. Storyboards are a vital stage of the pre-production process, and can be used to link pre-production with production – I will use these storyboards to plan the animation, and understand the chronological order of the important shots of the sequence. They break down the story into clear individual frames, presented in black and white to show depth and distinguish different elements of a shot, and with red arrows to show movement.

Panel 1 – a crashed spaceship drifts towards a planet

Panel 2 – the ship has crash landed on the planet

Panel 3 – the main character walks away from the wreckage of the ship

Panel 4 – the character comes across a deep hole in the ground. as they are peering down into it, the ground begins to shake.

Panel 5 – the shot is framed so that the opening of the hole looking out into the cloudy sky looks like the planet. the character falls into the hole.

Panel 6 – the character is falling down the hole rapidly, deeper and deeper.

Conclusion

Creating concept designs for my creative project has helped me to progress development of the initial story idea to the point where I am ready to animate it. Sketches presented the ideas in a visual form, concept art refined the sketches and helped to develop a clear look for the animation and storyboards are the rough outline for my final animation.