Rough animation test

Hello.

Since we last posted on here, there have been all sorts of distractions, business-based and otherwise, and so development has slowed down considerably. However, we've nearly completed a rough storyboard, and I've started animating a bit of it.

It helps me to do little animation tests as early as possible, as it gives me an idea of where I can tweak the designs of the characters to simplify animation. Wherever there's something about a character that makes it a pain to animate, I simplify it as I'm roughing out the animation, and the character I end up with at the end of the project is usually much more streamlined than anything I could have come up with on paper.

It's visible here, I think - the King, at the end of the animated gif, has a noticeably more consistent shape and sense of volume.

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The King - Colour Test

Here’s an animation test of the King! I wanted to get the idea of the visual style down in a video, instead of having it floating around in my head any longer. Making it a video helps to show the kind of ‘boil’ we want for the colouring – scribbly but fairly precise.
I had an idea for darkening areas of the characters clothes, so that they were still blocked out against the brown background but nonetheless had some subtle variety to different areas of their body. Stell was initially dubious – and with good reason, as the pure whiteness of the characters against the ‘brown paper’ backgrounds was a popular aesthetic choice for this film – but as the video shows, the new colour variety is incredibly subtle. It also gives us the chance to show off a beautiful watercolour wash simulation that we’ve been playing around with lately, adding another gorgeous layer of boiling shade to the lively characters.

I should also mention that although the test was made recently, the source animation is a little older and depicts the King in an earlier stage of his design; since doing this animation, his head has grown a bit (rather appropriately for the character), and there's no outlined shading on his crown. I do, however, like the simplicity of his gown lining terminating at the bottom of his head, instead of wrapping around it as I've drawn in later versions. Food for thought.

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The King

The Wall

Hello! Like the debut album of many artists, this first post is called, quite simply, The Wall. This is a blog documenting the production process of The Wall, a personal project between Estelle Sharpe and myself. Here, we will post concept art, storyboards, animatics, inspiration sources and anything else that seems relevant to the film. Hopefully, it should build up into a definitive record of the film’s evolution, from idea to idea, from pre-production to production to post-production.