Senior Project Journal pt. 1

I'm going to start documenting my progress on my Senior Project animation for college. The meat of my animation can be seen in this storyboard, with some more story added before the boards to show that the owl is hungry and wants to eat the squirrel, and give insight as to why the owl's so nervous.

As of right now, I have the animatic done (for the most part) and one shot finished. Working in Flash makes going from pencil tests to finished animation really quick and painless.

I had used the owl design seen in the storyboard as a placeholder, to be redesigned later to look good. I tried a couple of different designs before arriving at the one I've chosen. Actually I didn't try that many, three tops. Here's the first concept:



I didn't feel it was true enough to the chubby, easily-flustered character in my storyboards, but I liked the graphic style of it, that was something I wanted to carry over into the final design. Sooo, I tried adding design elements I liked from the first concept to the original owl design in this quick, sloppy sketch:



That was kind of ugly. But there was something in this design that led me to the next and final design, but first, a color change to something a bit more easy on the eyes:



Mmm, that was better. I then tried another design, blending aspects of the original design with things I liked from the redesigns:



Success! I didn't expect to arrive at a conclusion that I actually liked for a long time, I had devoted that entire day to redesigning the owl and suddenly found my schedule open for the rest of the day. Hello Dragonball Z: Boudakai Tenkaichi 3 for the PS2! The cocaine of video games for the DBZ fan, a game I cannot step away from for long. Anyway, I slapped that owl on a quick background and then I have a rough idea of what my final animation is going to look like:



Yes. I liked it. Time to go forth with the project. I animated one of my new scenes I added to the beginning of the film, a close up shot of the owl's reaction to seeing the delicious squirrel ripe for the eatin':



Haven't been so proud of something in a while, this thing makes me laugh quite a bit. So that's where I am, I will update when I've accomplished something significant, hopefully someone sticks around to see how it's going. Thanks for reading!