2nd Year Group Assignment

For this assignment, we had to work in a group and make a pitch project on a story that the directors and producers had randomly picked. The group I joined had gotten the story about Tunnel 29 and had made it into a childrens story. This intrigued me and after a meeting I was chosen as the lead animator for this project.

(The pitch project was directed by Ian and produced by Oleksandra)

Idea about the show

Before working on the pitch itself, we as the animators, illustrators and character designers, got a moment to try and see if we understood what the project was about. This was a separate assignment when we just had formed the teams. First we tried to see what kind of characters would be in the show, at this point it was not yet decided, so we still had free reign.

One of these designs ended up in the very small animation that we made. Although none of these characters made it into the final versions of the show, they did help as inspiration for later story moments.

The small duck character was my animation, the background was created by José and the other character animation was by Andrea. (Jorge, wasn't available at this point, but helped a lot with character design and backgrounds.)

Scene try out

Whilst the storyboard and characters had to be created, I as one of the animators was asked to try some scenes. These characters ended up in the pitch, but in a very different form than how we see them here. I had also never worked with robots before so this was a challenge to see how far we could go.

For the last few practice shots (these are just a few) Andrea helped me by animating the big robot.

Although this was good practice, there was an extreme amount of back and forth between me and the director. Our director was very indecisive, he had too many ideas and kept changing the scene. This was very confusing and a bit frustrating, mostly because I didn't know how to work with that yet. To help both me and the director, the producer gave me a temporary assignment, to work on animating the characters and seeing how I would do.

After trying to animate a small reaction with two different designs, I decided to try to practice the character designs that were being finalized at this moment.

Character Practice

The final character designs were great to have. From this moment we could really steamroll into the production phase of this project.

Also the silhouettes were important to have, so I worked on those.

Scene animations

Once the scenes were divided, I began working on the different scenes. Since I'm rather quick with animating, I also helped out with a lot of other scenes, that I hadn't had received at first.