This week we continued on working on our worlds, before being given a talk from Sean Cunningham, Animator Co-Founder and Creative Director at Studio Meala. He spoke a little about himself and we had a Q&A session with him, asking about the industry, future plans, design techniques and a bunch of other stuff.
Following the feedback on our character designs, and the stuff Sean mentioned about really pushing the silhouettes and exaggerating features on a character to make it a more interesting and distinct design, I revisited my character designs from last week, to try and make it more animation friendly and exaggerated. I’m not confident in stylized, cartoon characters so I looked at what another group member, Katie, did with her designs, as I really liked her style.
The linework was never finalised, I never really cleaned it up or anything because this week we got to choose what group we would like to work in, and I left the Nespresso Noir world.
I ended up returning back to Group 9. the dystopian submarine world. I learned about how the world had now changed since I left, with their now being two outsiders on the ship instead of just one, a male and female protagonist. As well as removed some ideas that the new group didn’t really like, it started to drift into a Scooby Doo direction, and we wanted to bring it back to its more gritty, cosmic horror origins. We settled on the themes we wanted to be conveyed in this world; fear, loneliness, hopelessness, confusion, and started to talk about the direction we wanted the story to go in. The group is now me, Cathair, Jess, Harry, EJ and Cain.