This assignment we were tasked with creating an animated short based on the theme of ‘Journey’. I was placed into group 13 (Lucky!) along with Max, Sam and Kain.

Our first course of action was to, obviously, come up with an idea. We were limited in our concepts though, as one of the criteria for this project was that our characters could not have legs so we started by thinking of things that didn’t have legs we could turn into character. In the end, we came up with three ideas:

• The Quest for the Stone of Harpilla Valley: a robot not only has full knowledge of everything. But lost someone close that was caused by the main antagonist who is also after the stone in the background of the over arcing story. The robot became empty and hid himself from everything else to mourn and heal from his lose. (Concept art by Max)

• You Got Snail!: A snail postman who has to travel across the garden to deliver a present. (Concept art by Me)

• Ghost Problem: Three ghosts must defend their home from the paranormal investigators trying to capture them (Concept Art by Kain)

In the end, we all agreed that we liked Ghost Problem the most. 

 

As a group, we communicated mainly through Discord. It was ultimately the easiest option as everyone had busy schedules that didn’t line up often and it helped us keep in contact and easily exchange ideas. After deciding on our idea, I went to research potential style references and inspiration which helped me put together a mood board for our short.

For the overall aesthetic, we knew we wanted the characters to be very cartoonish and comedic, so we looked at the Luigi’s Mansion game series for inspiration when designing the main characters.

 

 

 

 

As for the background, we wanted a more dark, whimsical atmosphere. For this we looked at the movie Monster House for the interior settings and Tim Burton’s architectural art for the outside of the house.

 

 

 

 

Each member of the group split up and designed their own version of each character (of which there were 4). That way, we would have a lot of vastly different and unique designs to chose from. Below are my designs:

 

 

 

 

In the end, we decided to go with one of my designs for the green ghost

When designing the antagonists, the initial designs we came up with were generic however we received feedback from the tutors that something about the designs felt out of place. Max then designed some more interesting and stylized designs.

 

I also did some concept art for the set designs

 

To decide who made what part, we divided the story into 4 sections and each member chose which part they would like to do. I ended up with the intro/starting section. 

Here is the original synopsis of our short: Three totally un-scary ghosts have their home invaded by two paranormal investigators, who captures one of their friends. The two remaining ghosts must go to an elder ghost across the street to train how to be scary and rescue their friend. However, as we hit the storyboarding step, we quickly realised that this was far too ambitious to fit into the time frame. To fix this, we decided to have the elder ghost (now a demon) live in the attic, and have the demon be the one to scare the ghosts away. 

 

 

 

Before animating, we had to create a 3D Previs to roughly visualise what the final animation would look like. In my previs, I made a few minor changes to my section. For example, instead of the Beerbelly Ghost jumpscaring the audience after the intro it’s now the Lil’ Ghostie as I thought it would be funnier; and instead of the two smaller ghosts jumping out the window to escape the ghost hunters they faze through the roof.