Preface

This is a kind of a working dairy. The background and requirments will be showed here.

• Animation Video
• Project Brief
• Progress Board

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I got the feedback and needs to change the perspective to this:

(And put all the characters who have occupation standing behind their stalls.)

John also give me some guidance on character design: (Thanks John!)

Back to the background, that’s a very good perspective. But considering next shot the cat falls from the right side, to match the focus of audience’s eyes, I mirrored John’s draft.

Also the erected tent seems too common so I re-designed the stalls they have. I add the plaque and draw the products they sell according to their jobs. The draft is as follows:

Also do some clean-up to see the final effects.

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Choose some positions and design the characters. Not very much because I think I have been running too far in the wrong direction…so I ask John about some advices first.

And also the draft:

I put the designed characters walking around the street or buying something, but maybe it’s too complex to animate? Also there are too many things to move at the same time.

The most thing I considered during drawing the background is perspective. To make the background world convincing, and considering all the characters have different heights, I kept my attention on the horizon–“All things go through the horizon have the same height.” (I found it’s very easy to betray that law…)

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I meet John on M207 to talk about the next task. I need to finish the layout of shot 2 and the rest storyboard. The layout is about designing some background characters and stalls.

For the character design, I think of the jingjiqingkuang and culture of the place where street market could appear to infer what kind of people will live around. (Obviously a billionaire will not live here.) So I make a list of all the possible positions which may suits this story:

• mujiang
• huajiang

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The first thing we decided to change is the running part from 01:08 to 01:18. I redraw the storyboard and put them into the video to see the effects.

(While drawing I was like:” The perspective is so easy! “, then draw a wrong line.)

I gave John two versions. One contains the underwater part and the other doesn’t. John choose the first one.

Also I think there may need one shot to reveal that it’s the police who chases the cat. John thinks for not adding too much on the background, he can add a up shot to reveal.

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John said he needs the background design, layouts, and some inbetweening on selected shots, so I’ll start from the background design.

The backgounds to be designed are shown as follows:

There are about 17 scenes during the animation, I categorized them into the following types:

1. One panoramic view of a bay market;
2. One shot of a market stall(not the father’s one);
3. The father’s market stall and the street;
4. One pan of other stalls along the street(as the cat running);
5. The spring;
6. The police station and the jail;
7. The father’s house:
   1. The cat’s room(varys as he grows);
   2. The room dealing with fishes;
8. The fishing spot;

After talking with John, some of the background will be modeled by CGI, I’ll start from the shot 2 background, and refine some storyboard.