The groups coming up with the world for their animations had to switch up members every week and on week 5, I had to switch groups. I was originally with the Space Olympics group, but on week 5, I switched to a group that came up with the idea of a magical academia. The conflict for the idea would be a horde of evil mushroom monsters. The group originally thought of the main characters being anthropomorphic animals.
Week 5 was when we started working on characters, so I came up with these. I pictured the main character being a dog who is a trainee witch and drew some incidental characters along with them.
The character design inspiration came from Hanna Barbara and UPA cartoons, as well as the Cartoon Network show, Chowder. You can see the influence through the thick line work and animal characters.
Another group I tried to design were the antagonists of the story, evil mushrooms. I designed them as boney and lanky I took inspiration from the game, The Last of Us for their designs, as that game has fungus zombies in it.
I did like the design work I had done for the project, but they weren’t used as in the next week, the project had changed tone from the original project. We had changed from anthropomorphic characters to humans and the genre felt more like a YA action horror. We still kept the mushrooms, who attempt to take over a magic school.
I did these 2 concept drawings for what I figured what style it should go for. For the first doodle, I went to the zombie aspect by having the mushrooms infecting people by touching them. This was partly inspired by The Thing and Resident Evil. The second doodle was what I would’ve had as a shot in the animation to show off the threat of the mushrooms.
I continued doing characters for the animation. I first came up with a design for the main antagonist, a principal for the academy who goes missing and comes back as a fungus zombie. These are some concept sketches for his design. I was inspired by the movie, Darkman for his design.
The other 2 main characters were a student of the school and the new principal. The others in my group came up with the concepts for the characters, so I tried to imagine what they would be like in my style.
I updated their designs when I got to my storyboard to be more inline with how their finalized designs would be.
The group did their storyboards when the story was finalized. I did a short one to visualize what my part would look like.
The story was then rewritten a bit so I had to redraw them to make more sense. I tried to make it more readable through the use of value and contrast. The way I framed the storyboard was inspired by the anime director, Hiroshi Hamazaki, through the almost surreal, emotion based framing. For example, when the old principal shows his face, a detailed grotesque painting will show on screen to shock the audience or when the new principal recognizes him, it’s an extreme close up on her angry face.
I later translated this storyboard into an animatic. It is not as detailed so I could focus on what the movement and timing would look like.
The first shot I’ve animated was the final shot I did for my storyboard, as I thought it would be the easiest to produce first. It is a zooming shot that focuses on the character’s expression.
This is a short reference for the character Vern for when I animate her.
This was the first shot I animated using the digital software, Krita. I only used Krita once before to do a ball animation. This helped me with how the program works.
It features Fern and the new principal finding out the identity of the mushroom zombie leader. When using Krita, I start off with sketching out what the scene would look like and then outlining the sketch on a separate layer.
At the end, I decided to take out the traditionally animated shot as it looked out of place and it used an outdated design for the character.
I added separate layers for elements in the animation such as characters and backgrounds. I used the selection tool to take out parts of the layers that overlap.
The scene features the characters scrolling across the screen. I achieved this by dragging the layers forward and back. It was meant to show the distance between the two characters and to achieve a parallax effect.
The next shot I worked on featured Fern shooting a magic spell out of her wand. I had a bit of trouble with this shot. The storyboard had Fern’s arm waving around to do the spell. In the original line art, I accidentally had Fern’s hand the other way around. I fixed this when I redid the linework. I gave the animation more weight by using tweening on the last frames of the arm swing.
I also practiced perspective in my animation by having the camera zoom out from the characters standing from the top of a stairway and having the beam from the wand shoot down from the stairs.
The next shot done shows Fern realizing the identity of the head mushroom zombie.
The shot I animated shows the silhouetted figure of the head zombie in Fern’s pupil and zooms in to show his face. I did this as a way to animate a unique transition. The shading on the character decreases on each zoom.
I painted the frames at the end of the shot, as a homage to the anime director, Osamu Dezaki. He uses these painted frames as a way to add emphasis to the emotion or the tone of a scene.
Afterwards, I did the shot that preceded the shot I animated before. It shows the magic beam that Vern shot from her wand hitting the head zombie in the face, causing his face covering to get blown off and revealing his face to Fern.
This shot of the head zombie revealing his eye through his fingers was not in the original storyboard, but I added it in to make the scene more chilling.
The second to last shot I did was the first shot chronologically. It’s a reaction shot from Fern. The shot is just a scrolling shot. It starts off with a black screen so that it could transition from the previous animator’s part. The lighting is high contrast with intense black shading.
The last shot I did was the second chronologically, because I had trouble with thinking how I would storyboard and frame the shot, as the storyboard version of the shot was visually dull. I decided to change it to go off from the previous shot, with Fern looking shocked and sweating.
The scene has the mushroom creatures approaching Fern and the headmaster. The original mushroom monster designs were all black, so I made them look very simple in the animation, to give them a surreal nightmare quality. I used their designs in the second shot to frame them around the door that the head zombie comes through.
The head zombie coming through the door has him form into a full figure.
After finishing this shot, I began coloring. I used these images as references.
The way I used color in this animation was tone based and I used to emphasize the tone of the scene, such as the background changing color to fit the character’s emotion. The scene below is inspired by Dario Argento’s Suspiria, where suddenly the lighting would turn red due to the fear a character is displaying.
Another way I used color is through the lighting, particularly through the magic used in the animation, as the beam emits a vibrant color around the environment and the background. This visualizes the effect the spell has on whatever it hits.
Here is a video with all the shots put together.
Reflection: Animation Studio Reflection – Mark Smith’s blog (ulster.ac.uk)
Previous animation work: Animation Studio – Group 5 work (Space Olympics) – Mark Smith’s blog (ulster.ac.uk)