[Research] UFO designs

Above is a series of images I used when designing the aliens and UFO for my animation. I looked into sighting photos, examples of other ships from the games Metroid and Destroy All Humans, as well as the paranormal photos from the intro sequence of Gravity Falls.

[Pre-Production] Visual Research - Backgrounds

GRAVITY FALLS
Both my original farm based idea and the bunker based idea take an amount of inspiration from the Disney cartoon, Gravity Falls. The show follows two twins on summer vacation in a town filled with paranormal activity and mystery. One of my main influences from this show is the background style, taking full advantage of the mise-en-scene, colour, and easter eggs to create a truly mysterious and wonderful atmosphere.

The pictures above have very strong key colours, which is an important part of my animation as I'll be using the lights in the lab to create a strong atmosphere that communicates the mood to the viewer.

COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG

The background art style for the original farm idea was somewhat inspired by Courage the Cowardly Dog. Using a crooked architecture in the middle of nowhere helped create an atmosphere that reflects the sociophobic protagonist, Hermit.

[Pre-Production] Visual research.- Aliens

POKEMON

Due to the small size of the aliens, I decided to play on cuteness to get an appeal across to the audience. To achieve this, and also envision how they may move and express themselves, I looked at Pokemon. With over 700 current designs, a lot of particular Pokemon were similar to the simple design on my own characters. Below is a selection of character designs:

These designs all feature a similar body structure, with a large, round head roughly the same size as their body. Using this simple base, the characteristics of each design were then brought out using colour, additional features such as ears or tails, and through a variety of eye and mouth styles.

INVADER ZIM

Created by Jhonen Vasquez, Invader Zim is a cartoon about a rogue alien under the illusion he is taking over the planet Earth. One thing I took note of in the character designs is the uniform the aliens wear, each following a similar design, just changed to match the different characters' body styles. I gave my alien tro matching uniforms to create a sense of unity and identity in their characters.

[Pre-Production] Character development.- Hermit

Throughout the course of this animation the storyline has had changes both large and small, and naturally these changes have had an impact on both the setting and the characters used in the final video.
The video initially centred around Hermit, a grumpy farmer character who wanted to be left well alone by others. This privacy was then broken by the introduction of the aliens. Hermit went through a few alternate designs after being called unfit for looking "like a little boy". By the time I'd gone through a few changes, I no longer liked the character and felt he'd slipped too much from my initial intentions, which was when the scientist approach came into play. I moved on from Hermit and created an entirely new character, Clemont. This character takes the same lonely nature as Hermit (as I wanted a gap for the aliens to fix). Clemont lives in an abandoned surveillance bunker, looking for creatures such as bigfoot which have been rumoured to be seen in the area. I followed the same story as my initial idea, with the aliens crash landing and the human character helping to fix their ship before it explodes, but the characters seemed to lack an initial drive and closure. This is when I decided to make Clemont a painter. Using this I gave him a reason to be looking for creatures on the screens in his bunker, as well as something to complete at the end. He lacks technological skills, which are then accounted for when the aliens stay with him at the end, giving him complete focus on his goal, which he finally achieves.

Above is the initial design for Hermit. In the first pass he was planned as a bit of a clumsy scatterbrain, shown by his long arms and blank stare.  I decided the first pass didn't look enough like a farmer, so I had a change of costume and added the grumpy side into his personality at this stage too. With this second design, I made a character sheet:

The style was somewhat impacted by another project I was developing at the time, and I thought the characters looked a little too similar once I'd made this pass. To the left is a concept picture for an online show Eddsworld that I worked on, containing a similar face structure and body build. This, combined with complaints from tutors about the character's age pushed me onto  few redesigns of the character, none of which I particularly grew attached to.

[Research] Lighting and mood boards

Before finalising the art for my graduation animation, I decided to gather some images to use as art reference and create a series of mood boards. I wanted to get a contrast going between interior and exterior environments by using key colours, blues and reds for indoors, and greens and oranges for outdoors. I want to be able to use colour in scenes to tell the progression of the story, for example using red as a key colour in the dangerous and most tense scenes and cool blues for the more stable and calm parts of the story.
A big part of the environments is the difference between natural and artificial light, the outdoor scenes will have more colours, whereas the indoors will focus more on a key colour.