09/11/2010 - Research for Matt

As lead artist on 'Smitten' my primary role is backgrounds and sorting out the colour scheme so I thought I'd have a look around at existing castle animations/shows and what I've done previously.

I did a similar animation for the Industry Exercises 1 project last year and here are the backgrounds I came out with then;








This time round, I want to make the backgrounds more detailed. I know I can do a lot better than these now but nevertheless the colour is quite nice in them and its a good starting point to look at.

Here are some backgrounds that Matt himself has pointed out to using;

And he says he wants a 'wonky' sort of feel to them, not generic and ordinary looking which should make designing them more fun in fact :)

As for the style of the overall animation, he had this sort of thing in mind;


Gobelins is a huge inspiration to this project and I definately want to try my hardest, this term in particular, to get the backgrounds looking as close to Matt's vision as I can. I am going to try and go over his storyboard, see which backgrounds are in the animation, and roughly (without colour) sketch them up for next Monday.

For Thursday, when we all meet next, I want to have coloured in his storyboard so that we start properly mapping out the colours. Here are the initial colour schemes for the characters Matt has come out with;


The green design will most likely be used for Don..


Red for Princess Dulcinetta..


And yellow for the Tower Guardian.

I need to think of the background colours in conjunction with those of the characters so that they don't clash or blend in with the backgrounds.

My driving point in this project is mainly that I know Matt will come out with some amazing animation, having seen so from past experience, and I want to do that animation justice with great colour and backgrounds. I am very motivated by this group and is the one I plan to mainly focus on!