Studio Guided Project Introduction -storyboards, character design and turnarounds

We where put into a group of 4 and started brain storming ideas that where relevant to the two topics of “don’t judge a book by its cover” and “internet safety”. I came up with an idea to combine internet safety with false information where a child is on the internet and finds a video of an influencer claiming that water is poisonous, this makes them spiral and the video causes tons of false information to be spread online, eventually their friend tells them to use a trustworthy search engine and they find out it isn’t true .As a group we decided to go with that idea.We called our group “3 and a half girls”

We used the white boards in the room to brain storm all of our different ideas and keep track of who was doing what. We also used the white board to do a rough of what the story boards looked like , doing this in person made it easier for us all to contribute our ideas for the story board, in the story board we see an establishing shot of Poppy sitting at a desk scrolling in their phone and then then seeing the influencer online saying that water is poisonous, then we get the montage sequence of things escalating and Poppy dries up. In the end we get the nerd coming into the room and telling Poppy to search it up online and it comes back that the information is false.The idea to have all the characters be humanoid plant people was Shannon’s idea.

Rough story board-

While doing our planning we also kept in mind the professional pipelines we where going to be following so starting with the ideas stage and pre production with the storyboard/ animatic and concept art. We had many inspirations for our project, and it was mostly all inspired by shows seen on Cartoon Network, especially shows like the ‘amazing world of gumball’ and ‘Steven universe’.

Inspo videos-

Script created by Barney –

Poppy first design –

rose and the nerd first designs-

I was in charge of designing the characters and I thought it would be interesting if as a group we all made some designs of the characters and then afterwords I would take all the working elements and mesh them together. We had at least 4 main characters that needed to be designed, Poppy who is the cowardly main character who is susceptible to false information online, the “ nerd” who is the more reasonable friend who enters at the very end to help Poppy, the “yes man” one of Poppys friends on a face call who encourages Poppys freak out, and finally the influencer who is very over dramatic but fashionable.

For Poppy I decided to stick with my original design since I thought it wasn’t too complicated, they are based of the pansy plant due to their cowardly nature and his colours are yellow and blue, I wanted them to really stand out, so they have a very different head from the other characters. They also don’t wear clothes because I didn’t want their design to be to cluttered and I felt as thought they stood out just fine without needing unique accessories, I was thinking of the logic used in shows like “gumball” where many of the characters are very different from each other and some characters wear clothes while others don’t.I felt as though their design gave them more of a main character look.

For the Nerd I combined my design idea with Courtney’s design idea, in Courtney’s design the character has a very cute and unique hairstyle which really fit the characters vibe so I combined our two designs together, I gave her a bow tie and glasses since I thought it fit into that nerdy vibe but then she’s wearing overalls dress to give her a more casual look. This character will be a rigged character by Courtney.

nerd mixed with Courtney’s design –

The Yes man is a very playful type of character and in one of Barney’s designs he drew a character with a flowerpot for clothes, this was very cute, so it was implemented into the yes man’s design, he has a sunflower head as being a sunflower adds to this sunny bubbly personality he has. Once again, this character is very different from the other characters due to his shapes in his design.

Mixed with Barney and Courtney’s design-

For Roses design we were conflicted between mine and Courtney’s design, I made two variations using elements from Courtney’s design which I really liked both but ultimately went with the original as a rose fit more into this fashionable persona for the influencer, she’s very “ Gen Z” influencer inspired so she wears a crop top and bell bottom jeans, she’s very differently proportioned from the other characters due to her being a fully grown adult.I also gave her heavier makeup in this newer design because I liked Shannon’s makeup look in her design.

my design and Courtney’s version design –

Line up-

The next step was creating turn around for Poppy and “nerd” since they are the only characters that move their entire bodies, both of the characters were supposed to be rigged but unfortunately Poppy wasn’t, and we decided to just go with hand drawn animation for Poppy like the rest of the characters. When creating the turn around I tried my best to make sure everything was lined up together to keep the characters consistent throughout so that the rigging and animating process would be simpler. I also created an expression sheet for Poppy since he is one of the characters that has the most expressions, the expression sheet was inspired by gumball with its very wacky over the top expressions.

first draft-