For this assignment we were tasked to make a 30 to 60 second animation in a group with the theme of food. In my team I had Jason, Isaac and Joseph and our animation is called fried or freed.
Story Idea
To Begin our assignment, we thought It would be good to just brain storm rough ideas for a story. We bounced between themes debating between making a horror, comedy or adventure story. We decided that we would have more freedom in design and in animation if we went with a comedy. From there the brain storming began. We started jotting down ideas and in the end narrowed it down to 3 that we liked the most. Our first idea was based on the food chain in which characters would eat each other one after the other and each character would increase in size and value. Our second idea was a sausage escaping a butcher. And our last idea was a chip escaping a chef in a food truck. As a group we decided that we preferred the last idea the most as we saw more possibilities for comedy and by that point already had more in depth ideas for the story, once the chip had escaped the food truckhe would sigh with relief, a seagull would then come and swoop him.
Character Concepts
Once we decided on doing our food truck story we then started planning what characters we would make as well as an overall theme we would follow when designing the characters. To begin with we would need a chip, we talked about making a curly chip or wedge cut chip but in the end we thought it would be easier to model and rig just a straight cut chip.
We then needed a chef, our chef went through a lot of designs, as a group we started drawing forms and body shapes with one or two features that would be more exaggerated to give our character personality. We decided to go for a design that resembled an older man with a large beard and big eyebrows. We took reference from ‘cloudy with a chance of meatballs’ and decided to make the eyebrows so big that they cover his eyes. As one of our restrictions in this assignment was our character could have no legs we also took reference from a game called ‘overcooked’.
We then needed a seagull and one more character as there was 4 people in our group and we needed 4 characters. For the seagull we decided to just use a normal seagull as reference and model it in a way that would fit in with the overall theme that our animation was trying to achieve. We then decided decided to make a fish in which the chip would befriend, again we just made a normal fish and modelled it in a fitting style.
Environment Designs
For the exterior environment we are taking reference from Vespucci Beach where our van would be parked on the sidewalk with its back to the buildings and its front looking towards the beach. for the exterior scenes we thought it would be better to just make 2 rows of buildings and angle the cameras in such a way that the horizon line wasn’t visible.
We then planned on having a scene of the chip looking out towards the beach as it takes a sigh of relief. in this environment we are planning on making volleyball nets, sun beds, fold out chairs, umbrellas and coolers to fill the beach with. For the interior of the van we planned on making it feel like a hunting cabin, dirty and old with heads of fish on the wall and glass jars full of bones from fish. We thought about making the chef a food taxidermy by putting fish and chips in a display frame with pins in them.
When making design for the food truck we came up with an idea that there would be a large fish with chips in its mouth on top of the van for advertisement an a large sign saying ‘fish n chips’ on top of the van as well as undersized wheels to give it a more cartoon look.
Story Board
When creating our story boards we all decided to do separate versions of the same story and piece together what parts we liked and wanted to use.
My version of the story starts off with an establishing shot of the food truck and foreshadowing of the seagull, it then cuts to the chef cutting chips and throwing them into the frier. One chip manages to land on the side of the frier, the chip then takes this opportunity to make to make an escape, the chef then notices the chip trying to escape and starts taking swipes at the chip, however, the chip does manage to escape and the jumps out of the van onto the sidewalk. From there the seagull then flies down and grabs the chip.
This was the story board we ended up going with has the same beginning however the chef is instead preparing fish and the chip comes out of a potato sack and there is a fried fish that the chip befriends. The chef discovers them when they react to the fish getting cut in half. Once the chef notices both the chip and the fish he then cuts the fish in half making the chip jump out of the window trying to escape. from there its the same ending were the seagull swoops in to grab the chip.
We then gave a presentation to show what point we had got to. From the feedback we got we made some changes, first was the chef design, the old design would have been really hard to make so instead we simplified it. we then had to change some parts of the animatic to make the story more cohesive.
Final chef Model
For the texture of the chef I was experimenting with different styles, on has blank colours with stains on the shirt, the middle one has just blank colours and one has cell shading. We have decided that we wanted to have line art on our characters and scenes.
We have decided to use 2d faces that we could animate for the chip and chef. For the chef this allowed me to make him blink and I mad 2 controllers so that the blink can be offset.
Final Environments
