Update(*)

Im listening to different pieces of music and I have decided I want a more inspiring/emotional soundtrack to create a big irony and try create a stronger impact to my message I am trying to give across.

Shortlist:

Sort Of (Instrumental) - Ingrid Michaelson

Radical Face 'Welcome Home'

Foxes - Youth

(Advert version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JEDA2p2MHk)

Working Progress #1

Here is my animation so far. The first scene basics is complete, the man walks out his house, trots down to his car and drives off to town, which is shown isn't very far due to the sign saying 0.5. Here people can clearly see where he's going. From this i can already see where i can add/improve when ive made my whole animation. I could add more elements to the scene to make it more dynamic, realistic, motion. I could have birds flying in the sky, two people throwing a ball to each other out on their garden, a dog maybe etc. After effects is getting easier the more i'm using it. Im really annoyed though because I have a really good idea what I could of done for this project, when listening to music I found a peice that gave me a really cool thought in my head of making an epic fight between Co2 and things to prevent it, using characters. I really wish I chose music first for this project. I shall learn from that. But carrying on with this I shall now begin my next scenes.

Text - Font choice

The message at the end I have finalised as:

"Co2 is increasing global warming. Don't drive when you can walk."

The message is short, snappy, straight to the point and strong. It is built up from a jokey theme to sudden emotional theme then the encouraging theme.

The font choice can be either b to fit with seriousness, be strong, bold and fit the bill. Or it can be in the same style of being jokey and fun to keep the consistent theme.

I will analyse different fonts and think what would be best in my opinion.

Research

The fonts above are all a very serious horrific style of font. It has a very strong theme what would encourage and go well with my message, it just wouldn't fit the jokey theme, i think the contrast of themes is too much.

The fonts above are a typewriter style. Again I think it would fit a serious message, but I cant see it going with my animation, the sudden change in theme would be too much.

I have decided I want to pick a font from this bunch, it is a cartoony fun font to go with my theme. And having the serious message in the jokey message creates irony, and i think this irony will work. It will still be strong and enforced by the irony even more. I like the use of capitals cause it looks more serious and I like how the letters in 'Peach Milk' are blacked out. That again shows a more serious edge but still a jokey twist. So therefore i will use peach milk as my font.

Pitch - Analysis

After pitching my proposal to the class everyone understands now my chosen themes and the idea I want to create. My themes were keyed as: Playful, Fun, Jokey, Emotional, Childish, Imperfect, Organic, Orginal, Funny, Strong, Bold and simple. The recations of the class were people finding it funny which is a postive reaction. Someone said it would affect children more, which I agree. Cartoons make children more emotionally attached to characters. The polar bear can do this which I would want to make an impact on everyone not just kids, I want people to feel sorry for the polar bear which would encourage to reduce Co2 emissions. You could say affecting kids more can affect adults even more as obviously they are parents to the young audience, and its their future generation being affected by global warming.

I am ready to start making my illustrations and animation.

Music

Choosing music was so hard for me, I think it would of been so much easier to pick music first then design my idea to the music because each piece of music is different and would have its own style to fit it. As I already have my idea and I know visually what I want it to look like, finding music what can fit the correct times of different scenes and relate to it is difficult. I first thought if putting calm, slow music such as pieces from bastille, but they didn't really fit when I tried them in my animatic. I looked at coldplay songs but I thought they were too emotional for my jokey fun theme. I listen to songs from embrace and I thought they could work, I found a track called celebrate which I am familiar with anyway, as i see it in a lot of football videos with emotional clips in, its a epic song which goes well with dramatic clips. I tried it in my animatic and I think it actually went really well. The slow quiet build up led up to the drop of a dramatic instrumental tune which synced really good with my animatic, the dramatic drop went with the polar bear drifting away from the other polar bear. It looked really dramatic and emotional but funny at the same time which fits my theme perfectly. Unless something else pops up  embrace - Celebrate is the music i have chosen.

shortlist- (Songs other people can look at and might find useful).

-Coldplay paradise instrumental
-imagine dragons it's time
-embrace - natures law - instrumental
-embrace - celebrate - instrumental

Research - Art style/ visual style

For my art style, i'm just going to look for inspiration as I don't want to copy anyones style as I want my drawing to be original.

Family guy

Family guy characters are created by Seth MacFarlane. Each character is drawn with a weirdly shaped head which is nice and original, I like their eyes as well, you can see the comic and humour through the characters eyes, especially through peter griffin. 

Courage, the cowardly dog

Courage the cowardly dog has its own original style. The bold lines, the different shapes and sizes of facial features are the most important factor of the appeal principle. You can tell this character is a coward which is how he is meant to be. The tiny powerless arms, the big worried eyes and the yellow teeth sum up the personality of the character.

Sonic the hedgehog

Sonic the hedgehog enforces the appeal principle perfectly too. Just from a still image the art style of sonic portrays his personality as cool, heroic, his hair looks aerodynamic which enforces his fast speed aspect. The big hands and feet and the skinny arms and legs I think looks cool, the imperfection is something I really want to establish in my own work.

Research - Animation

Right now I am not certain at all what visual style of animation/drawing I want to undertake. This research will be very useful for inspiring my choice of style and drawing whilst incorporating the principles of animation.

Roobarb, When Custard Got Too Near The Bone

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4aVXeDg3U4

This animation of Roobarb, works really and I really like the visual style. It is drawn in a personal and organic look, already I want to go down this route. I want to make my animation look original, in a style whats not copying any other. Digital style for me is too cliche, I think if its your own style then it deserves more appreciation. In this animation the artist has this scribble, imperfect effect. I like how the dog is drawn it inspires me as I am using two polar bears to draw them like how the dog looks, i just like how the colour isn't completely filled in and the animation has this sort of shake and vibrate effect on all the lines drawn which gives it that more realistic and dynamic look which I really like.

• Shakey effect
• Hand drawn style - original./organic

Looney Tunes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3GE-DrE3eE

Looney tunes is a great inspiration for animation, the reason it was one of the biggest cartoons in the 90's is how brilliant the animation is made. Each character has their own personality and all their actions depend on their personality; how fast they move in motion, how they move around, their facial expression. The portray squash and stretch and anticipation brilliant for example road runner, his legs spin to generate the energy then when he starts running his neck and whole body looks aerodynamic to how fast he is running, looney tunes is just a great example to understand the principles of animation.
The personalities of each character are so brilliant as they relate to their animals lifestyle, bugs bunny for example is a chilled character and daffy duck is a more short tempered character who gets angry easily, ducks in real life can get angry really easily. Their movements portray their personal which i really like.

• Character personality
• Funny
• Portrays principles 

I already know how I want my animation to look like with the key themes I want to go about, my animation is going to reflect character personalities like looney tunes does. With symbolic objects like the sun, clouds, co2 are going to have faces and a personality. I want to portray a same jokey immature theme too.

Wacky Races

Wacky races is similar to looney tunes in the way the characters react and their actions are influenced on their personality. The visual style is really original, the cars and characters look really organic, i love how they are drawn. It looks really unrealistic and imperfect which makes it perfect. Things are drawn which wouldn't make sense in reality; the cars are designed really nicely with each car matching the personalities of the character driving them but some of the cars for example theres a car made of wood with razor blades as wheels what wouldn't work in reality. I like how this metaphoric and imperfect style it is really something to consider myself.

• metaphoric
• imperfect makes perfect
• personalitys

Cramp twins

Cramp twins is a very unusual cartoon, two twins with pretty much opposite personalities live extraordinary lives. There personalities are expressed really well in the cartoon. Wayne the blue twin is the evil, dumb and energetic character where as lucian the other twin is the smart, geeky twin. I actually like how they are drawn. Big heads with little facial features and alien looking features such as their nose. The characters have this black line stoke around them to give it a more 3D and realistic effect which is nice, but it can be quite uncomfortable to look at in my opinion, as other objects don't have it its not consistent.

EDP (Jessica Walsh)

This animation if effective for its style which is built up of simple 2D shapes. The animation shows like a journey through everyday life, each and every element is built up of shapes which I think is a really nice simplistic style. It has really made me want to use the same sort of style, I want to build my whole animation made of shapes just because its different and fits with my proposed theme of fun, playfulness and simple.


Mr bean animated

Mr Bean the animated series is a animation which can inspire my technical style. The use of character personalities is the whole theme in this which is emphasised by the imperfect drawing style. I couldnt find the artist that done the drawings which I would of liked to of saw. The boldness of the strokes in this are very bold, I wouldnt make it that bold in my animation but I do want to use quite a thick black stroke.

Research - Transport/Global warming

Transport

There are five different kinds of transport that give off Co2 emissions they are: Cars, ships, trains, buses and planes. Im thinking for my animation I either want to show Co2 coming off one of these transport or just completely focus on the consequences of global warming. I could either merge both of them, showing how transport can help global warming

Global warming

Global warming is caused by the sun heating up the earth; some heat is reflected back out to space but some is kept in a cloud of Co2 in a circumference above the earth which heats up the earth even more. Co2 which we know is caused in many ways I particularly see it from transport.

The consequences of global warming are quite extreme. The four key themes of consequence are: Weather, Wildlife, Environment and health.

I want to go down route of the polar ice caps melting which disturbs wildlife of polar bears. I will sketch out some ideas in my sketchbook using this theme, whether I will show that transport causes global warming in the first place i'm yet to to decide on.

First thoughts of my direction

After looking at the brief. I had 4 starting point directions I could take, that is either: The General Message, Food, Transport or lifestyle. Im not really familiar with anything to do with Co2 emissions, its not really a subject I take interest in at all so this project will be quite challenging. I've made basic animation in Flash before and done used after effects a little bit before for a short film I made so this will be nice to learn after effects a bit more. Straight away this project is making me feel uncomfortable, which is good as I have been taught it is good to come out the comfort zone.

After looking at the 4 different directions, I am more swayed to do more transport because it gave me the strongest visualisations in my head about what i could do than the other subjects. Im gonna research into CO2 emissions of transport to get some better knowledge of it and hope to generate some visualisation which I can then express into sketches in my sketchbook. Im going to try use this new start of the new year to improve my thoughts to sketches, I struggled before to draw more.

I want to conduct research into just one of the 4 because for me I think it is more efficient to pick one of the options as quick as possible, (the one that feels best) which produces more time for thinking, thoughts and more detailed research instead of spending time deciding. Time consumption is important in design.

After watching an 'Inconvenient truth' I made some sketch notes, and it actually really helped. It gave me some ideas on the theme of global warming and how CO2 is making it worse.

I think what I want to do is do research on transport and global warming, then the consequences. This is the area I want to do my animation on. I think this area can generate lots of ideas.