Choosing the final Groups

When we were asked to choose what group we’d like to stay with to create the final animation, I chose a group I’d never been a part of before. I chose to join the spirit sky fish group as I liked everything I had seen from their group so far, and the storyline and the aesthetics were really appealing to me.

I was online for this week, but the people who had been in the group and were rejoining and the other people interested in choosing this group were very helpful with explaining the world from their knowledge of it. We then created a discord server for the people working in this group so we could separate things into different channels and pin things easily.

We worked on fleshing out the story on this server and all the concept art and research done by the original groups was uploaded into the right channels. I spent some time reading through the storylines, concepts and looking at the character designs. I also did some research into Inuit traditions, housing, clothing, and hairstyles so that I could understand the setting of the animation better and ensure I was representing their culture properly.

Concept Art and sketches

I decided to try my hand at coming up with a design for the main character Amka, mostly the clothing. It took inspiration from Manny Maguire’s design as it seemed to be the main one throughout developing the world. It also kept key design aspects, like the braid and necklace.

I also needed some practice in drawing side portraits, so I chose to do some of my practices using Amka. The Amka ones are shown here. I think I definitely need more practice with anatomy, like how people move and side profiles. I have been practicing this more since.

After we decided to go with Manny’s design for the main character I decided to make some sketches of their Amka design, so I could get more comfortable withdrawing her. This allowed me to see how the character might move, or what expressions might look like on her face, a lot of the ones I chose to draw were all ones I thought would be relevant to my scene of the animation.

References

Spirit Sky Fish Moodboard

Inuit Clothing

Animated Inuit Characters for reference (references for the animation from group members)

Edit: Ended up using this video a lot to try and get boba’s (the whale) movements right in my animation, so I figured I would put it in the research post.