AC2: Concept Design.

Introduction.

In this blog post, I will show the process of designing my animation for the A1 fantasy brief. This includes the concept art, storyboards and animatic as well as design justifications to explain how my deisgns tie into the story, theme and brief.

 

Concept Art.

Here are the pieces of concept art i completed for my fantasy brief and the justifications behind their design.

Fiend (Main Character).

Here is the concept art i created for my main character.

Below are some justifications for his design in order to show my thoughts when designing him and relate his design to the genre and theme of my fantasy show.

Bat hair

• Fiend’s hair takes the shape of  bat wings – this shows that he is a vampire because vampires often turn into bats.
• The spiky look to the wing shape also fits with the gothic fantasy theme of the show – bats are often associated with such themes.
• The same spiked shape of the hair shows Fiend’s personality as being energetic and aggressive.
• His hair also gives distinctive shape to his silhouette to make my character design look more unique.

Red eyes

• I gave Fiend red irises so that his eyes were more piercing and distinctive, standing out from the purple colour scheme of the rest of his character.
• Red connotates to violence and blood and intense emotion which are all things associated with vampires.
• Typically evil characters, monsters and vampires are shown in media with red eyes – it fits with the theme.

Ears

• Pointy ears show that he is a vampire. Vampires are commonly depicted with pointed ears, as well as other fantasy species like elves and orcs.

Nostrils 

• Fiend’s exposed nostrils look like a bat’s nose – vampires and bats are commonly associated.
• It gives him the appearance of a creature mixed with the other human features of his face – this style of combining creatures with humanoids is common in fantasy media.

Teeth

• His exposed fangs show that he is a vampire – it is the most common way in media to show that a character is a vampire rather than just a pale looking human. (They bite people with their fangs so that they can suck the person’s blood).

He wears a suit

• Fits with late 19th early 20th century fantasy time period.
• Shows that he is born into wealth – vampires are often rich aristocracy (Dracula).
• I thought it just looks cool and I thought he would fit with the kind of style I wanted to give the animation.

Spiky shoulders on blazer

• Similar to devil horns which fits with theme of vampires/evil creatures.
• Once again gives unique shape to his silhouette.

Rib style ruffles on shirt

• This gives him a skeleton-like appearance which relates to the gothic vampires theme and makes his character design fit more with this style.
• Fits with the 19th century early 20th century style time period – shirts from this era had ruffles.

Shoes

• 1930s style black and white shoes often seen in dancing/entertainment shows he is energetic and agile.
• I saw the joker’s shoes in the animated batman shows from the 90s/2000s and thought they looked cool.

Purple colour scheme

• Purple connotates to royalty which shows his position being born to an important figure (his father is an important demon).
• Purple is also associated with mystery – and the story of the show focuses on a mystery.
• In parts of europe, purple can be associated with death and mourning (he is undead vampire and death is a big part of the whole aesthetic)
• I thought that purple fitted with the moody dark colours associated with vampires (black, red, dark blue etc.) 
• It looks nice in several shades as a suit, and also looks nice contrasted against his pale skin.

Backgrounds.

Here is a sketch I completed to conceptualize a background that I included in my final animation. I drew this in photoshop to give a basic impression of the composition i wanted for the background, and drew the final backgrounds in clip studio paint.

 

Storyboards.

Here is the storyboards I created for my animation:

As you can see, they are rather rudimentary – this is because i drew them very quickly just to give myself an idea of which shots i wanted in my fantasy intro and their placement. I then used this to create my animatic (seen below) and then used the animatic to create my final animation. I made this in procreate.

 

Animatic.

Here is an animatic that i created prior to starting my animation:

It shows several of the shots as an outline for my animated tv show intro. When creating my final production, I drew over this animatic – it is basically the ‘sketch layer’ of my animation. This is only about 2/3 of the actual animatic because when I rendered this video I was still creating it, and just wanted to demonstrate the kind of thing I was going to work from when animating my final production. I used Blender’s Grease Pencil object in Blender 3.0 to create most of my production with the exception of the backgrounds, which I drew in clip studio paint and then imported as planes behind my animation in Blender. The render engine I used was eevee.

 

Conclusion.

In this blog post I showed the concept art, storyboards and animatic that I created for this brief. It documents the progression from the idea generation stage to the stage of producing my final intro.