Developing Background Designs and a New Direction

From the start of this project I had wanted the backgrounds of my animation to be created entirely by hand with watercolour. I knew what that could look like and if it looked like what I in my head had envisioned then I knew the animation would look good. However, from the start of this project, I also knew that I was indeed no expert with the art of watercolour, so I was essentially going to need to learn it and not only that, learn it to the extent where I can make backgrounds that look very successful, not like they were made by someone at ammeter level. Therefore I knew it was a wise choice to get Lauren involved with developing watercolour backgrounds. I saw the watercolour backgrounds she was creating for her work and they really blew me away, especially because of how well they could look with her digitally drawn characters. So we were on the same wavelength on how we wanted our animations to look, I asked her and she was happy to develop my backgrounds for me.

Although, this did not entirely solve my problem. There are 80 shots in my animation, and I know that there wont be 80 different backgrounds that need to be created but even if it's half that amount that is still too much that I can expect anyone to create for any animation that isn't their own.

I had a knew idea at a random point that I could solve this problem with a new idea...

The New Idea

The story of my animation is told from the protagonist (Lucy's) point of view and the story is split into three segments; the first when she is ten, the second when she is thirteen and the third when she is seventeen. I felt that the backgrounds could reflect whatever age she is by looking like they were drawn and coloured by her at that age. So when she is ten I felt the backgrounds could be drawn with thick slightly wobbly lines and coloured with bright felt tip, then when she is thirteen, her surroundings look a lot neater and everything is coloured within the lines with coloured pencil, finally when she is seventeen, that is when I can introduce watercolour when she has matured enough as an artist or simply someone who likes to do it in their spare time.

Feedback on the New Idea

I received positive feedback about this idea from my peers and Annabeth. Although she did give me advice that the background designs should also reflect the character's mental state, since there is no dialogue in my animation I do need to rely on visual story telling. Therefore, when she is ten the colours need to be bright and colourful to show her carefree immaturity and the colouring slightly outside of the lines represents her sense of playfulness and fun. Then when she is 13, she is a very neat well behaved school kid who respects authority and is less fun than when she is 10 and more into her studies, this is represented with lots of straight boring lines in the background designs and light coloured pencils that stay within the lines. Finally when she's 17 I want her lines to look a lot more rebellious and abstract/experimental, I know this is the stage I really want to incorporate watercolour into but at this stage I am not sure how expressive I want the line-work to be.

Annabeth also mentioned to me that while she liked the idea, the changes in visual aesthetic could be jarring to the viewer. She encouraged me to when Lucy in the first scene is waiting for her dad to pick her up and is doodling, have her drawing her dad, then in a perspective shot we can see the drawing that has been created with colouring pens and the title of the animation 'Cops and Daughters'. Furthermore, she said that it would not be wise to leap straight into this and start creating all my backgrounds following this idea immediately, I needed to test it. I needed to create three examples of screenshots from the animation with each of the three different visual aesthetics to gain a solid understanding of whether this idea was going to work.