Character Design work: Londonder

After polishing up the second animatic to make sure it fitted together nicely, I started working on the design for the Londoner. The thumbnail I felt that worked the most was actually number A3 from the tumbnail sheet as opposed to the design that I'd been using in my storyboard. The main difference between the two is that the storyboard design is a lot stockier, whereas A3 is much taller and thinner.

I chose this design over the original as I felt that a taller, thinner character would feel much more like a London-based middle class office worker than a short and stocky character.

As I was designing him, I kept in mind Carl's design from UP, as I wanted to add a few small curves and circles dotted around his body to help emphasize that he isn't as stubborn or inherently evil as he might first appear, while still constructing his body primarily out of squares and triangles, however, while drawing up his head, I was also reminded of the Tove Jansson's Moomin characters, specifically Snufkin, so I pulled up a few reference images from Google to help me get the placement of his eyes right relative to the brim of his hat.

I'm in the process of doing a breakdown of all the details of this character, and should have it posted up here by Friday.

Preliminary Animatics

Following the mass of storyboarding I did over the last week, I eventually managed to compile everything into a solidly timed animatic. It was a little shorter than I was expecting, though. Instead of being about 3-4 minutes, it was closer to 1 minute:

Click here to view the first animatic

I then bought this in to show the tutors and received immediate feedback about how to improve it, so I knuckled down and changed the overall pacing of the film. I also expanded on a few key shots here and there to really hammer in the importance of the items within those shots: 

Click here to view the second animatic

First Storyboard Revision

I decided the fastest way to get started on the animatic would be to upload the Sketches I did in my hard copy journal straight to the computer and use them as templates for the digital board instead of trying to replicate them straight without any on-screen guidelines. 

After I'd taken the photos and trimmed them down, I messed around with the order of the last few to get it flowing a bit more naturally, then I decided to upload the storyboard here. Admittedly I need one or two more frames in the beginning to help show that the Londoner's watch is another big part of this story, but I can add those in when I put the animatic together.

Bird thumbs

I knocked these thumbnail sketches out really quickly, so I felt that before I started finalizing my storyboard, it would be a good idea to post them here for future reference.

I used frontal poses because I felt they'd be better for capturing the feel of the falcon's character.
Once I've done the storyboard, I'll return to this, pick out the best designs in the batch and then do a bunch of silhouetted side-views.

Thumbs for Londoner

I started thumbnailing the Londoner who finds the Graffiti after I'd got a solid idea about where the story was going and what was going to happen in it. I wanted to try and stick to a theme of 'grumpy, stubborn and a bit snottish'; the attitude of your average middle class lawyer. However, beneath his harsh exterior is a man who just wishes to find something that can make his dull, blue-collar life just a bit more interesting. To start with I gathered some references of the kind of urban character I was looking for and compiled a moodboard;

With that in mind, I started drawing the ideas up;

I grouped them based on the overall shape I tried to stick to when designing the character, so there's a group for Rectangular, Spherical and Triangular iterations of the character.



... now, back to figuring out how I'm going to tackle the falcon's design.

Beatboard frames

After doing a full storyboard, I went back to try and do a beatboard. A lot of the beats turned out very nicely, but there are a few I feel could convey the story a lot better.

Finalized Story following trip to London

Following the previous post, I changed my story one last time to be more reflective of what I learned about when talking to Paul Taylor during my visit to London and a video that a friend showed me on Youtube;

• The story is set in Modern London in the borough of Southwark, early in the morning
• It's about a stressed out middle-class worker in London who discovers a street painting under a railway bridge in one of Southwark's many side-streets.
• The man is too focussed on the rat race and 'being early' or 'being on time' to the point where it's ruining him.
• The painting is about the history of Falcons living in London and all of the struggles they've had to endure for the 500+ years that they've been in London.
• The man is originally skeptical about the painting, but as he looks at it it comes to life.
• The moving painting then draws him in to the story that it's trying to tell, and we follow his own mental journey as he follows the story of the painting.
• After the man finishes looking at the painting, he learns to accept that there's no point getting stressed out over life and that he should just learn to roll with whatever life throws at him and tackle it as it comes.

The main difference between this idea and every other previous idea is the fact that I decided to use the Falcons as a catalyst to tell a story about a completely different theme, which in itself sprung from the fact that a lot of people in our class -myself included- were getting stressed out over the story ideas for our films, so I wanted to tell a story that somehow reflected on that while using all the research that I'd done on falcons.

stylistic experimentation

Lat night I was doing some personal work, and I came up with something that I wasn't expecting to create. The inspiration came from a cubist painting by who I think is Picasso, but I could be wrong.
The colours I used aren't that important, but the method I used to 'construct' the character is.

What I did was take the silhouette and reduce it to a much harsher, geometric shape a la cubist design aesthetics, then filled in the resulting shapes according to where the light hit the body.

I didn't break too far from my standard style with this, however, I thought that this way of working would definitely be interesting to play around with, especially concerning the design of the Falcon.

Carrier Pigeons and Spitfires

After looking over my storyboard a few times, I realized I'd included two things I hadn't actually researched yet, so to make my life a little easier I went out and created some moodboards for those two things; Spitfires and Carrier Pigeons;

Story Beats and Rough Storyboard

I spoke with Neil today and got the message that I needed to start doing story beats to help plot how I wanted the story to work out, so I immediately started on that and then dived in to creating the storyboard. I decided that -based on the reserarch I'd done- the film was going to be about how Falcons have adapted to living in London, told through the medium of a piece of graffiti/ a mural on a wall somewhere in Southwark that catches the eye of a random streetgoer and seems to come to life.

Following this I drew up a very rough storyboard showcasing what sort of things I wanted to happen and when and compiled the 'beats' that would make up the key points of the story. Originally I intended for the storyboard to just be a beatboard, but I got so into it that it just kind of turned into the storyboard as I was doing it;

Sorry about the piss poor photo quality.

Here are the beats I was working off when I did the storyboard;

Reference films of Falcons

Earlier this Summer, I went to the ICBP (Interenational Center for Birds of Prey) in Newent to get some research done on Falcons so that I could see how they move and get a good sense of how to animate them. However, given that my film idea has become centralized around actually filming falcons -albeit in London- the videos I shot are much more relevant than I ever thought they'd be;

The second video also includes an explanation of exactly how the falcon hunts, but you have to turn on the sound to be able to hear it. It was the closest thing I could get to a recorded interview with Mark Parker on the subject of Falcons, and it covers most of the stuff you need to know about Falcons on the wing. Unfortunately, when I spoke to him before I shot this footage I didn't think to ask him about how you should keep Falcons or how they mature -which could have both made for interesting angles to add to the film- so I'll probably have to research that topic using books, articles and online videos/ existing documentaries.

Finalized story idea

Going off what everyone told me after I talked with them, as well as the feedback I received in my mail, I figured that the best story idea I had was the documentary, so I decided that it would be a good idea to write down the outline of the best idea I had regarding this topic;

• The protagonist of the story is a teenager who's touring London with his parents. He doesn't like being a tourist, though, so he tries to act disinterested (I used to do this all the time when I went on holidays with my parents when I was about 14-16)
• He takes out his smartphone and decides to start taking selfies to post to his facebook.
• In the camera, the teenager spots a Falcon catching some of its prey on the wing.
• He's suddenly fascinated by this bird that he's never seen before.
• The rest of the story focuses on the boy using his camera phone to take videos of the Falcons living in London as a way of showing how they actually live their lives.

The next ideas I had were much looser, but if done right I feel I could work at least one of them into the story without too much difficulty.

• To add a bit of drama to the story, at one point, the teenager could see someone trying to sabotage a Falcon's nest and have to come up with a way of stopping that person from sabotaging the nest.
• The saboteur could be a chav, an aggravated homeowner, or someone who just doesn't like Falcons all that much. 
• I feel that it would help to address some of the dangers that London offers for Falcons without coming across as too preachy.
• Alternatively, I could work in the story about the Falcon that fell from its nest (after attempting a premature flight) due to heat stroke, which could add another point of drama.
• The teenager might end up speaking with one of London's birdwatchers and make a friend based off a similar interest.

At the end of the day, the extra ideas still need to be tied down a lot more before I can make any solid decisions about them, but the research that I do in the following week should help me fill in the blanks.

Summarized Ideas based on the Theme of 'The Falcon'

As the ideas I had are currently spread across this entire blog, I thought I'd do everyone a favour and condense them into a single, easily readable blog post;

1. A documentary about Falcons living in London.*
2. A story about Falcons being used as assassins.**
3. A story about a Falcon being mistaken for a Swift (or vice versa)**

I'm not sure which one of these I should take forward, but as far as I'm concerned, they all have much more potential than my original scope was allowing.

* More information can be found the blog posts 'Ideas for the documentary' and 'In depth Falcon research'

** More information can be found in the blog post ''Assassins' and 'Mistaken identity''

Settings for Assassin idea and Swift idea

When I was thinking about where I'd set the Assassin idea, two things came to mind; the Hashashin of Persia (Iran), and the Ninja of Japan. Both of these groups were at their peak during the 14th century, so I figured that if I wanted to do this story, I would set it at around those times in an around Persia or Japan, so I created a few moodboards featuring aspects of those settings that I'd most like to explore;

Assassins historically operated from fortresses in which their lord or 'master' would dwell, and Falcons tend to stick to areas with lots of cliffs and an abundance of prey, such as mountainous regions, so I gathered visual information about these two topics to help me get an idea of how the story would look.


For the story of the Falcon being mistaken for a Swift (or vice versa) I looked at world maps showing the migratory patterns of each bird and compared the two with each other;

I decided it would be best to set the film in the Late Summer along one of the Falcon's migratory routes, as that meant I could make it about a journey shared by *potentially* all the characters involved.

The second idea is probably the loosest in terms of setting as there are a myriad of countries I could afford to set it in, so I decided to not go too in depth with the research on that subject.