Trial animation

Trying to create an initial scene has become my priority for this project. As shown previously on thumbnails I imagined the Baron telling tales to many women perhaps within a ballroom. This type of scene would set the status of the Baron and show his character within the opening scene, although I may use another introduction for title etc prior to this scene. My first step was to draw the Baron as though he was entertaining or speaking to a crowd. Shown below is the pencil sketch I produced, there are several errors although none to severe and easily rectified. The main issue is with the weight distribution as the back leg seems to low, also the folds on his trousers and jacket do not seem right.

The next stage was to take this character into Photoshop so that I can then begin to think about putting him in a scene. Being influenced by NAWLZ I knew that the backgrounds within this comic would be nice and bright so I purposely kept the Baron within a range of blues which would contrast the background of the ballroom. The only thing which uses bright colours is his cane which appears to be made of gold and a large precious stone to show his wealth, final result of this is shown below.

When producing the first image I thought about where the final product may be displayed. Would this comic be for PC or would it be available for tablet? As this is to be a sample version which is primarily to look at style and functionality, it is not aimed at any market, or for any particular device. However I thought it should be important to create something that would be compatible for PC and a high end tablet. My decision was to make this compatible with iPad and chose the spec of the first generation to base my images on. The finished images I create should be 1024 x 768 pixels set at 132 dpi as shown below (newer iPads have higher resolutions, mini iPad now same resolution but higher dpi so would work on all iPads in production)

Prior to completing the image of the Baron I also created the basis of what I thought should be the background colours. This also allowed me to play around with the scale of the Baron and see where I thought he should be positioned within the image, this is shown below.

Using this layout would mean that the ballroom should become secondary as I want the focus to be on the Baron. As I wanted to trial an animation very quickly I overpainted an image I found of a ballroom which had the perspective I was looking for. Although this is not something I would usually do this was required to let me see if the background colours and images could move separately or if they would be better kept together. Shown below are the image I found and the overpainting created from that image.

The next step was to introduce this image and also trial different versions of the Baron. This was due to me trying different brushes for shadows etc and I wished to see them all against the same background to see what differences there were.

After dividing which brush I preferred it became more about the scale and position of the Baron. Then having a trial of where I could place text was done also playing around with scale etc.

This layout was something I was happy with and decided that this was enough for me to trial a short animation using this image. There will be many other characters included in the final image but there is no real requirement for them at this point. The focus of the task was to produce something to let me begin to see how different factors may be combined. The short animation which was created is shown below and has definitely brought progress to this project as I can now begin to see visually how things may come together regarding style, textures, animations and text.