Category: Main Workshop

Stick Up For Trees!

Plain: https: StickUpForTrees.mp4

 

Film Version: Stick Up For Trees (Film).mp4

 

 

 

 

I was inspired to create an animation based on air pollution after seeing a factory and huge amounts of smoke coming from its chimneys on my bus journey home. I just liked how the smoke looked and could envision it in an animation. After this, I started brainstorming and researching effects and causes and landed on deforestation. 

Designs

The style of my animation was heavily inspired by the art of Cuphead (Studio MDHR, 2017), I’ve always loved this rubber hose style and I could envision the story perfectly with this look and was really excited to work with it. I used a lot of Cuphead and Disney’s ‘Silly Symphony’ as references for my designs. I also wanted to keep everything in black and white to have the animation look more aged, so simplistic designs were vital.

Smoke Cloud

 

Trees

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The idea for the trees was to have them all move in sync, similar to ‘The Skeleton Dance’ from Silly Symphony, 1929. As the main piece of the animation, it was important to me that I did a good job of designing the trees. I wanted to make sure that their movement was well done and it was easy to understand what they were doing, their dancing was fairly simple for me to work out but trying to decide how they were going to breathe in the smoke was much more difficult. I kept feeling that it looked more like the trees were blowing outwards, so I spent a long time trying to find references for this. I ended up finding that ‘Grim Matchstick’ a character from Cuphead, had a movement where he breathes in before blowing out fire, this was incredibly helpful to me and I was able to make a much more believable design.

 

 

Flowers

 

I was going to have these flowers at the beginning of the animation dancing alongside the trees but felt that it would become too busy and over-complicated so decided to leave them out. I still really like the design but I’m still happy with the animation without them.

 

Gas mask Guy

 

I needed a character that would replant the trees to push the story forward. I wanted the design to be fairly simple and not to have a complicated face to draw in each frame so landed on this design with a gas mask. I felt that it fit in really well with the rest of the animation due to the smoggy atmosphere of the earth, a gas mask seemed like the right choice, I also think it really suits the rubber hose style by having an ambiguous character.  I started researching gas masks because I had a general idea of what I wanted them to look like but wanted to make sure I wasn’t straying too far from how they really look, so it was still understandable. I struggled for a while on how the body looked but landed on this sort of bean shape. I really enjoyed designing this character and was really excited to have him in the animation.

 

 

Factory

 

To design the factory I had been looking up different factories from the 1920s and 30s, I found this quite difficult as every time I drew the design it looked like a school to me. I originally had a fairly tall building which I found drew attention more than the chimneys which I needed to be the main focus, so I made the building smaller which definitely worked to emphasise the chimneys, making it look more like a factory. Whilst animating I had struggled to get the right look for the chimney’s movement but took inspiration from the steamboat funnels in the early Disney animation, ‘Steamboat Willie.’

 

First Draft Storyboard

 

The idea of my animation is to have trees dancing and slowly being chopped down to reveal a factory that is pumping smoke into the atmosphere. This then would create a large smoke villain taking over the earth. At this stage, I wasn’t entirely sure what would cause the trees to grow again to disperse the smoke and had thought of using questions to then use Ecosia as my charity. Later I scrapped this idea because I didn’t want my animation to come off as an Ad. Later I made the gas mask character to replant the trees and created another storyboard with this added in.

 

 

Second storyboard

 

There were still a few changes from this storyboard to the final outcome.

 

Backgrounds

Looking at old 1930s animation, the backgrounds are a lot more detailed and somewhat realistic in comparison to the characters and actual animation.

Examples:

My Designs: