Telling Tales: Concept Work

I've stated in the past that I really struggle with the early idea generation side of animation. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate how important it is. But when I get an idea in my head that I like I tend to just want to start animating straight away. But I can't really do that, especially when I'm working in a group and both Matt and I have our own ideas on where we want to take the animation.



Since writing is definitely not my strong suite I felt I needed to present my ideas visually. to get inspiration I had a flick through my own 'Art of Pixar's Inside Out' book to gain inspiration. I was amazed at just how much concept work goes into every film.







And I know that's a given as Pixar films have hundreds of animators working on them. But what surprised me was just how much time is spent on creating concept work before making the actual film. It is obviously a very important part because everyone has ideas of their own and through creating all this concept work and presenting it to each other eventually the film forms from that.

And although on a far smaller scale, the same applies to Matt and I. So even though creating concept work is important to my own development it is also essential for Matt as well so he can gain a better understanding as to what I want to go for with the animation and the same applies the other way round.

I find it very difficult to represent the mood of something like an animation in just line drawings. I find colour plays a very important role in representing the mood and tone of what I'm going for. So I created the above image of concept art in Photoshop. I didn't include any outlines or character emotions because I just wanted to convey the mood of the animation in colour.

The inspiration to create something in this style came from two artists that feature heavily in the Art of Pixar's Inside Out book, Teddy Newton...

And Lou Romano...

What I love about how these artists work is that in much of their concept work for Pixar films, their drawings involve no outlines and often no visible character features whatsoever and yet the mood or tone the artist has gone for is conveyed perfectly. It's just a really nice way of working different from my own that I wanted to give a try. Furthermore the feedback from my partner was very positive and gave him a good idea of what I wanted to go for with the animation and it also revealed to me that he was thinking in a pretty similar way.