It took a long time to come up with an idea, too long. I began looking into the element 'Earth', only because I felt of all of them, earth was the most intriguing. I began researching images of where nature takes over. These images were often of places that have been abandoned by humans and then left for decades for nature to take back the land.
I thought of the idea to have a young girl playing with her dog teddy on a hill. She gets called by her mother and runs off, accidentally leaving her dog teddy behind. Then we see a time-lapse of around fifteen years where we see nature take over; grass grows up around the teddy, a tree grows in the background, older builds morph into new buildings, flowers grow etc.
I felt that my last animation was very character based and while I perhaps most enjoy working with characters and creating animations that are fundamentally character based. I really wanted to try something different and go in a completely new direction. Now this animation is told through the eyes of the element earth, rather than an actual character.
A dog teddy is featured in the animation because I new I needed a teddy to reference and a dog teddy is just what my roommate happened to possess. I took the teddy out across the road to a hill about a minute away from where I live. This hill will be the inspiration and reference for where my animation takes place.
I took many photos of the teddy from every possible angle I thought I could possibly need (always better to have too many photos than not enough) and I also took photos of the surrounding scenery that I felt could be used in my animation.
Plotting out the story and creating the storyboard happened pretty much simultaneously with beginning the process of developing my animation. The reason for this is I new the actual workload of animating this short was going to be massive. This is due to the fact that I am not just animating one thing, I'm animating everything, from individual grass grains growing to shadows moving.
Below is my storyboard...
I began by sketching the dog in the different positions and then after scanning in the sketches and placing them on photoshop, went over them with a solid line. The first bit of animation I wanted to do for experimental purposes were the grass growing around the teddy.
On a separate layer I drew around ten grass strands standing at different heights in a line. Then through using the same technique as hand drawn animation I extended the grass stands slightly on a new layer and continued this process for around nine frames. Then after the grass had almost doubled in height I went back and added extra frames in between each old frame. This way we can watch the animation for longer.
Just drawing and colouring these frames have taken a very long time to do. Around fourteen hours if we're getting into specifics. I felt that to get the right effect not only did the grass need to be coloured with a solid colour, but they also needed to be shaded with a lighter colour to add the effect of a light shinning on the object.
To save time in my animation I thought instead of drawing, colouring and shading a sky, to instead use photography. I feel this could add to the time-lapse effect if I took photos of the sky at different points in the day, e.g. every ten minutes. Or I could take photos of different parts of the sky, so when I play it back it looks like clouds are passing over incredibly quickly like in a real time-lapse video in some sort of nature documentary.
Another inspiration for me with this animation is the quote from director/animator Hayoa Miyazaki...
I am very interested in the idea that man underestimates nature and that the planet doesn't really need us at all. If we were to all suddenly disappear off the face of the planet, the planet would just carry on living and the element earth would take back the land we have spent centuries developing.
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