Vlad's Studio Practice: Animation 1: Character & Narrative Weekly Summary 1

Digital rendition of placeholder shot

During this first week I have attempted to structure and organize the initial ideas I got during the briefing as me and Jay immediately started brainstorming into "Adrift". Through a coordinate plain that divides 4 aspects of our generation of ideas (technique/aesthetic, soundscape/atmosphere, character, and narrative), we recorded every single idea, inspiration, association, and concept we came across in our pensive session. Leading to that, I mapped out a rough idea of story progression on the spot by jotting down key movements and details that might serve as elements when we craft the final diegesis. With this, me and Jay also discussed a multimedia approach where we blend several techniques into one, initially jotting down which elements are gonna be handled with which technique (written in sketchbook). Thinking of my character, I got into crafting him through iterations and brisk designs of his appearance in my sketchbook, trying to map out a few different shapes of the character. Refining him along the way, I drew different faces, different body shapes, and got an idea of doing the character's face with charcoal to instill a more expressionistic emotion range that would go with the atmosphere. This is where I created a mood board that outlines most of the elements in the animation's environment and space suggesting the dark tone as well. Moreover, with the idea of the atmosphere being dark and macabre in the form of a dreamscape where the environment is a psychological plethora of symbolism, I wanted the character to reflect his own subversive nature.

Mood Board

Along to all of this I created one rough sketch of a shot which I had in my mind - an above introductory/establishing shot which I mapped out based on an actual image of a boat going through the sea. With a few more pages of rough character design progression, I drew expressionistic emotions which can be used in the background as symbolic elements (along with the pills and bottles of alcohol that are gonna flood the space). In the meantime, both me and Jay did our own version of a placeholder possible shot for color chromatic and spacial reference - digitally, whereas along with this I made a short stop-motion animation stemming from a sudden idea by using oil, black ink, gold ink, and milk in a bowl and taking pictures of the brew stirring up sequentially, emulating the cosmos. Don't know what we will use it for yet, but my guess is it can serve as an intro or as a moving background. Finally, I mapped the diegesis progression through the tragic drama scheme of plot along with thumbnails that further articulate the story although the final one (storyboard, animatic) has not yet been assigned.

Stop-Motion Asset - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXTu01_s8lM