Pre-Production
By Alex Toner
Targeted Audience
I would like our animation to be humorous; this means I will have to include moments that get a reaction out of the audience. I will do this by doing effects that make the snails look like they're going fast when they aren't similar to the popular film, Turbo.
I will animating and modelling the second scene of the animation I am are planning on making the scene start in a subway, where two snails race, the snails will be faced with a set off stairs and escalators. Because I want to make the animation funny for the audience I would intend on adding gore to the animation, this will change the target audience from young to around teens.
After research into the targeted audience of teens and young adults I have found that adding gore and humour into the animation will be correct, I have asked various people that fit the targeted audience and the feedback shows that they would prefer watching something that was funny and had gore in it.
Resources and Materials
The animation will be split into scenes, The first scene The House (Ewan) , Second The Subway (Alex) and the Last The House (Ewan).
First Scene -
The first scene will start inside a house, the living room is shown. Ewan will make the scene set at night with thunder in the background. This will consist of flashes of light, noises of thunder and shadows. The camera will pan around the room and then aim at the TV screen, then will zoom into the TV to give the impression that the the audience is now watching the TV. This is when the TV show starts and moving over to the Second scene the Subway.
Second Scene -
In this scene it shows a TV show starting, the show is about two snails in a subway tunnel and they come across a set of stairs and escalators. Both snails try to race each other to the top, as they are racing I will animate an effect that will make the snails look like they are going up the stairs at high speeds to create a climatic effect however this is not the case, this will be similar to the effect from the film Turbo to achieve this I will use a wide variety of colours. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xyyfQCupcw).
The snail that takes the escalator route is wining the race, when he reaches the top he thinks that there is a ramp, this is not true. The snail is then crushed by the escalator.
Last Scene -
The last scene will start by panning back out of the TV screen, where the snail (Snail watching TV) is shown. When the snail is shown Ewan will make the snail look horrified. Then the living room light will switch on, this is will make it look like the person who lives here has stepped in the room. The snail looks towards the light switch then the animation will show a black screen and a noise will happen that will give the impression that the snail has been crushed.
Potential difficulties
Links to Tutorials
Animating Escalators - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-zlQQVM2ck
Production Logs
We started thinking about various concepts for our animation, we came up with the idea of something (Animal related) trying to grab an object, object continuously gets away creating fun.
Week 2 -
We expanded on the animal related animation and started thinking about what else to add to the animation.
Week 3 -
We decided to start the animation in a living room, then the camera zooms into a TV progressing into another environment. We did this to create the immersion of the audience watching a TV show.
Week 4 -
We expanded on the animation from starting in the living room to now starting outside the window of the house then pan inside. Once the camera pans into the house it then turns and enters the TV and a TV show starts.
Week 5 -
As for the TV show we wanted it to start and show a snail doing an objective (that we needed to decide on) then the snail gets crushed by a foot. And the show ends, going back into the living room.
Week 6 -
We then started thinking about different scenarios for the TV shows, we came up with the idea of a snail trying to complete a difficult challenge and then not completing it, to eventually being crushed by a foot.
Week 7 -
One of our TV show ideas was of a snail trying to climb stairs, spending a long time doing so and then reaching the top only to have the camera zoom out and showing that there isn't a lot of stairs after all. This would show comedy towards the audience as it took the snail ages, unlike it would take us a matter of seconds.
Week 8 -
After coming up with a pretty strong plan for the TV show we decided to watch various cartoon animations from Disney to see how they captured comedy in such a small amount of time.
Week 9 -
After gathering information about how to capture comedy, we decided to change the idea of stairs slightly, now there is two snails in the animation. They both are in a shopping centre and come across a set of stairs and escalators, they look at each other and race to the top.
Week 10 -
Now that we had changed our idea we set out out add comedy into the animation. So the snail who is on the escalator wins the race however as he reaches the top he looks back and has a smug smile, whilst this happens he gets stuck and crushed by the end of the escalator.
Week 11 -
Eventually we realised that it would be quite hard to model a shopping centre, so Alex thought it would be best to change the environment to a subway. As for Ewan, he decided to not unclude the window at the start of the animation and start behind the sofa and just zoom into the TV.
Week 12 -
For the end part of the animation we wanting the audience to realise that the show was over so we decided to have the camera zoom back out of the TV and rotate around looking back into the living, this is when you see a snail shocked at what it has just seen. For this we will use different facial expressions to gather emotion from the audience, it is at this moment the light will turn on and then it goes to a black screen and crushing sound, this is to hint that the snake has been crushed and is now in fact dead. Once we finalised the animation idea we began to gather research about snails, subways, living rooms and various styles of the animation.