Production Diary - Week one - idea generation

 For this project I want to bring more maturity into my finished product, so I began to take inspiration from television programs that have adult themes and humor, mainly sketch shows - due to the 30 second requirement of the brief.

However I did take inspiration from the channel 4 sitcom 'Peep show' for an idea on the theme 'rivals'. The idea revolved around having the main character going to work and having to put up with an annoying co worker in an office setting, one that he had to compete with to win the affection of his crush.

I felt that this was a good idea for the theme of 'rivals', but could not think of any real practical way of animating the story that would fit involve a mixed media approach which is how I would like to go about producing this animation.

 When I began thinking about ideas for the animation I realized that the kind of animation I want to produce would be a very dialogue heavy end product, so I had to think about the practicality of this and realised that i would have to produce lots of different shaped mouths - either digitally or by hand - and to me this did not seem necessary so i have decided early on to instead use live action video for the character's mouths.
This may result in a very comical looking end result which i am okay with - as long as it can be tied in with the overall aesthetic of the finished animation.

I decided to simplify my idea's - still focusing on the theme of rivals, I looked at the word 'rivals' and thought of other words that could be associated along with it, 'competition' was the first word that came to mind.
I had the idea of two flowers on a wall arguing over who can grow the fastest, or attract the most bees etc. I then realized that i had the opportunity to make something that could be quite playful in the sense that I could include a level of maturity in its delivery but at the same time have an aesthetic that would be similar to some children's television programs.

This is due to the bright colours and acrylic paint that i will be using to create each asset of my animation.




Here is a rough storyboard/thumbnails of what might occur in the animation.
It is still in the developmental stage and will need to develop organically as the project progresses, this is due to the fact that I will be using live action video for the character's faces and want to give the dialogue a slightly improvised feel to it.
I will however use a simple formula to tell a simple narrative of rivalry - the character's may even put aside they're differences to help one another.

Upon reflection I feel that the idea that i am going to stick with will have its challenges in the technical aspect of the project but with some experimentation I will be able to overcome those challenges.