This week I have been developing the plot and design further. I wanted a plot that acknowledges Pansy's strength, uses humour, and uses the fact that she's in a band. The plot I've ended up is set in her school music labs, where her and her bandmates have been set the task of going over some slow paced classical music, but when the teacher is distracted with headphones on they take out their instruments to practise some rock music of their own. This change in music attracts the attention of an animals riffling through the bins outside the window. I'm torn on what this animal could be at the moment, a seagull, pigeon, or stray cat could all work. It looks up to the open window and either flies up to it or scrambles up the side if a cat. The band notices it looking in and go to close the window but the movement freaks out the animal and it rushes into the room which causes a frenzy for everyone. They chase them around the small room trying to get it back out the window, during which it tears at the wallpaper, knocks books from the shelves, sulks at the top of the bookcase to be tempted down by someone's lunch, but is still resistant to anyone's grasp when down on thee floor again. During this there'll be a cut to the teacher outside the room, facing away with headphones on, listening to a calming mindfulness recording whilst you can see the struggle blurred in the background over their shoulder. Once the intruder is back on the floor it runs over the guitar that has been placed down. The sound of the instrument intrigues the animal as they start to play with the strings, which is when the band realises that it came in because of their music. Pansy slowly picks up the guitar and demonstrates a few chords, much to the creature's delight. We then cut back to the teacher who begins to hear the rock music over their headphones, they take them off to check in on the band, to see them in a completely wrecked room, all playing their own music around a raggedy looking bird or cat.
I came to this plot via my thought process from last week, when I considered the idea of making Pansy Potter a similar figure to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Although I liked this idea I felt that I couldn't introduce supernatural elements to Pansy's story as her comics have always existed in the real world without fantasy or sci-fi components.
When it comes to choosing which animal is going to intrude on the band it's going to be down to which design I prefer, as well as how well each creature can interact with the setting. I've begun some basic explorations of the animal character in my sketchbook.
Otherwise this week I have been playing with the style I'll be animating in. In my previous posts the style has basically been how I felt like drawing at the time to get concepts for characters and fashion out of my system. Looking back at those designs they don't look as appealing for kids as they could be, they're a little too real, even if far from realistic.
I made this mood board of different artist styles that I was interested in, the Shavrin Ivan and Mike Mignola parts were from when I was still considering doing a plot with monsters in, whilst the other artists present were all to inspire the style of the human characters.
I also want to think of the movies Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World whilst thinking of the general design of the film. As both works are based off/inspired by comic books they translate aspects of their design into the cinematography and style, especially speed lines, text describing sounds and impacts, as well as introducing panels into the frame. Below are some sketches of my experiments with style and playing with adding speed lines and text inspired by the Beano.
When it comes to animating these aspects in I'll go over the scenes in both films mentioned to see how many frames the text is usually left in each circumstance so that I can achieve the effect to similar success. I've drawn up my more finished designs of Pansy and the band in Photoshop and now my next steps are finalising the animal design and doing some test animation to have something good to show in my pitch. I'd also like to make some clean model sheets of my final character designs.
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