Personal Development – Research and Concepts

For this project, we had to create an animation that showed character and personality using audio. I wasn’t sure what type of storyline I wanted to go with, it was only when I was scrolling Tik Tok that I got my inspiration. Queen Astrea and Angus V-S are two of my favourite to watch, and when I saw this one, I knew I had to animate it using my own characters.

The audio, I believe, is from Friends.

At first, I wasn’t sure about having a female characters with a distinct male voice, but in the end I decided it didn’t really matter. There’s only a tiny bit of dialogue, and I liked the audio too much to choose another. I already had two characters I knew I wanted to use – Mog Chromia and Hana Aikyo. They are sisters, with Mog being older and adopted. They exist within the Final Fantasy XIV universe, but are my own characters.

Mog is the happier, slightly traumatised older sister. She’s protective of Hana, but still acts like the younger sister with her naivety. Her colour scheme is pink. Hana is younger, yet is wise beyond her years. She’s more rebellious than Mog, constantly annoying her parents (they still love her). Hana is a hunter as well and Mog is a seamstress. Her colour scheme is green. I drew up reference sheets for them with their colour palettes.

With characters decided and backstory more or less determined, I drew up the storyboard.

In the original scene, the characters run while in the Tik Tok, they hit each other in a flurry of hands. I didn’t want to do the exact same as those two scenes, so I thought of adding the typical cartoon fight dust cloud you can see in TV shows, and anime.

 

 

 

I always thought the dust cloud was a funny way of showing a fight escalating, and it gets the point across quite obviously.

One worry I had was the height difference between them. Mog is very tall, taller than Hana, and I wasn’t sure how to get that across without Hana looking really small. But it did turn out well in the end. This was a scene taking place in their early years, I was thinking that they would have been 14/15 while this happened, and I wasn’t confident that I would make that obvious. My art style doesn’t help, since they do look like adults, or at least Mog does – however that may be due to her height.

I animated in Clip Studio, as that’s the software I’m most familiar with. Unfortunately, due to the limit, I had to split this into two parts. I ended up using the Windows Video editor to add the sound and also slow down some parts, and add additional frames.

(Above are the two parts, no sound and no additional frames).

As I watched anime growing up, the action is very anime-like. With the action lines and the over exaggerated movements and facial expression. I combined anime styles of comedy with Western visuals. To express shock I had the characters’ eyes grow smaller and also made their mouth straighter, and decided to stick with the same line thickness.

 

I am mostly happy with how this project turned out. I think my timing is quite off however and the movement is stiff. I would definitely look at trying to find a happy balance between stiffness and fluidity, as sometimes my animations look too flowy. I found trying to animate the mouth was more difficult than I first thought as well. I found the project really fun to do, and it helped me think more about my characters and their relationships.

 

Finished Video