Major project - Character development

As the narrative of the animation changed, I altered my designs of the characters. It tells a story of a young woman seeking connection with her and her grandfather through the shared love of piano. According to the plot, we are going to demonstrate her as a kid as well in the flashback scenes, so I also did the design of her as a child around 5 years old. I decided that as she was raised up by his grandpa, the colour of her outfit would be similar to her grandpa's.

For the second crit, I did a few iteration of the outfit, and regarding to the feedback we got, people like the autumn outfit the most, which is more mature than the other designs, that fits her age. I then progress the design into the turn around stage, as a character guide for us to animate as well.

D&AD BEANO - Story

Within a weekly regular group meeting, we constructed the story together with inspiration from comics produced previously for Ivy. Basically I suggested that her story would be a unexpectedly achieved goal with a series of mischievous. Inspiration from old cartoons of characters with similar characteristic helped generating the story as well. What we decided on at last, is she wanting to take the cookie from the top of the fridge, after a fail, manages to get it at the end of the story. We wanted her to be using all kinds of massive tools contrasting to herself.

As for her mom, we decided not to show her face, but like the maid in Tom&Jerry, limiting the view to the lower part of her body, as we want the camera to focus on Ivy herself.

D&AD BEANO - Character

We decide the roles as me doing the draft animation, Rey will be doing the clean up of the animation, while Natalia does the storyboards and backgrounds that will be used in the animation. We all take part in designing the character and putting together the story.

The method we are using in order to keep the project on track is to do a meeting every Tuesday， which worked perfectly for our regular updating on other people within the group. In the meantime, we inform each other on works with messenger as well.

We all came up with a character in the second meeting, we all liked Natalia's version of Ivy as shown above. Her body and expressions can be flexible, and compare to the older version, her body is more stretched and the braids are actually detached to the head. From the turnaround that Rey have made, I did a  few experiments on character poses, furthermore, into expressions as well. When she is ready for some mischief, her eyeballs become smaller while there is a lower eyelid.

Major project - Reference

As part of the reference on grand piano, we booked a grand piano room in Leeds College of Music to take photographs and videos for both the perspective and the proportion of a grand piano compare to human. It was very helpful especially for me and Guy doing the key frames to get the size right. In additional, helps animating the shots of close-up on hands playing the piano.

Another highlight was that during the filming of reference, I came up with a dramatic shot where the camera pans around the character for 360 degrees, playing with the position of characters, where will be visualised in the rough animation stage.

A reference video I asked people to filmed myself for the shot where the character is calling her grandma.

D&AD BEANO - Idea generation

Rey, Natalia and I decided to form a group for the brief as all of us are interested and wish to produce an animation to respond to the BEANO brief of creating a newer version of character chosen from the set the studio provides.

We agreed on the character Ivy the terrible, as she give a strong character trait and impression to us, and the audience of the comic. As the brief content suggests, she is a young girl who is desperate to express herself, and of course, a trouble maker. I took references from the original comic and here are some examples.