We had to simplify our story due to it being considered too complicated and having too many characters physically interacting with each other too much.
We changed the story by having the claw as a character as well so that there’d be less plushies. The claw is the antagonist where it keeps picking up and dropping the toy over and over for fun. When the toy plush gets upset about it the claw realizes that it went too far and decides to let the plush escape out of the machine. We made storyboards of it individually, mixed the storyboards together and then re-drew the mash up to make it cleaner.
Mashed up storyboards
The redraw I did of the mash up
For the designs, we decided to go for a predator and prey theme, where the claw would be like a snake and all the plushies would be prey animals.
some concept character designs
Reference
For the bird I experimented with pixelization. We had an idea that the characters within the arcade machine would be pixelated to give it a video game like look but my test of it doesn’t turn out as good as I thought it would. We all just decided to make the characters look normal.
A short Hike reference for pixelization
We were also talking about what type of theme or style we wanted to give our arcade so we sent a few potential references.
We decided to go with neon and futuristic like colours for the setting.
