This week I've been working on an animatic- instead of going straight into the knight/dragon idea I've tried to develop upon the bear/bard idea to see if I could involve the setting more. To begin with though, I developed what I wanted the bard to look like so I had a solid character to be working with, looking at historical clothing and other artist's work for inspiration, mostly Conner Fawcett's character design and Nuria Tamarit's illustration:
I really liked drawing the characters with layered outfits, inspired by Conner Fawcett's character illustrations. I know that this will create difficulties in animating the character but they don't move as much as the bear does and drawing clothing in more detail could be a good challenge.
I also drew out some sketchy atmospheres to work out what time I should set my film in, originally I thought that nighttime could be a good setting in the woods with the bard sat by a fire, but now I've tried drawing a daytime scene I enjoy the colours and if I could make it like the sun's coming from between the trees behind them it could look good.
I then did some research into medieval instruments to see what would work for my bard, I had drawn a bard with a balalaika in my original storyboard but as I had drawn my new bard design with a shawm I thought I'd look into different instruments and the sound they made to make sure I got the right soundtrack to the film. I watched several different youtube videos of artists and historians playing and talking about early instruments but found this one, by Silke Gwendolyn Schulze, the most useful, and even used some of her music in my animatic.
I made my animatic with pencil and animation paper rather than digitally like I usually do just for a change and I might go on to animate the film traditionally too because of this.
The lighting of the animatic isn't great, I had some issues with photographing the drawings which I couldn't edit out in Premiere Pro but the plan for the film is still apparent.
Comments