The purpose of this assignment is to use the information gathered in my sketchbooks as inspiration for a certain brief. Out of the brief options given in the OCA Student handbook, I chose the third, entitled “Everyday Stories”. I must create a short series of six key frames to convey the idea for a trailer of a short television programme (entitled “Everyday Stories).

In hand-drawn animation, the term “key frame” refers to the central stages of a character in action. First the animator draws the key frames, then they start filling in the action between those frames, and then again between the new ones, until the action is fluid. But I will be using key frames on a larger scale than a single action. I will be using them for a entire story. The key frames I will be using are similar to thumbnail drawings or a storyboard. However, storyboards are a far more detailed affair, showing the story step by step, while key frames are only meant to convey a few of the most important parts of a certain story. They are also meant to suggest the final style of the animation or film. This includes the genera, mood, general shape design, and color choices. This means that consistency among those six frames will be an especially important factor in this project. I must find a way for the frames to express different things, while still maintaining a similar visual language.

Key frames from the movie Inception

 After looking around to see how others do key frames and storyboards, I noticed that storyboards can be very sketchy, while most key frames are more like the beginnings of concept art paintings. They do not look like finished work, but they are colored. The most important part is not getting in all the details, but the silhouette of the small compositions. One common technique is to first have a base sketch, which is then painted over with black and white to create values, and then is finally colored (sometimes in multiple iterations.)

Ion Peia, a designer and concept artist, creates simple sketches then fills them in a painterly fashion, using the Photoshop lasso tool to select areas. He seems to skip the black and white stage for values, which I have seen in most other concept art and keyframe ideas.

To generate ideas, I first started with text. I wrote whatever came to mind about “The Everyday”. I used both the suggestions from the OCA book (things that I use everyday, things I say everyday, etc.) and concepts of my own (common occupations, emotions, times of the day, events, etc.).

After I had all these ideas laid out, I began sketching. First, I sketched six panels for the suggested “imagined everyday” for a fictional person (here, Sherlock Holmes), then I chose two occupations from the my list (schoolteacher, policeman) and sketched their everyday.

I chose to keep the actions themselves very simple. For the teacher (1) Waking up, (2) Brushing Teeth, (3) Breakfasting, (4) Driving to work, (5) Teaching, (6) Going out with friends.

And for the policeman (1) Waking up (with the wife, this time) , (2) Making Coffee, (3) Taking the kids to school, (4) Arriving at work, (5) Capturing Perp, (6) Reuniting the victim with his family.

The problem that I ran into, especially with the schoolteacher panels, was that they were not very interesting. Part of the very definition of “everyday” suggests a feeling of ordinariness and routine. In one of the policeman’s panels, which can be considered the climax of the storyline, I drew him hiding behind a wall, gun up, waiting for the right moment to shoot a bad guy. But this feels like departing from the theme, in a way, because I am not sure such a day would be considered “the everyday” anymore. Most policemen do not need to handle their weapons more than a few times in their entire careers.

A new approach was needed, after I had a few concepts going. I had to bring back to the forefront the objective of this assignment: To create a series of panels for a animated television trailer. This removes the problem I was facing before, with the extraordinary actions of the policeman not fitting into the concept of the everyday. The reality of animation is inherently different. The exaggerated nature of the characters tends to help with suspension of disbelief when it comes to extraordinary feats. Surviving falling off a cliff? Not a problem. Talking to animals? Routine. Getting hit by an anvil? Inconvenient, but that’s life.

This automatically opened doors to more interesting storylines, because while we wouldn’t believe that a real policeman has dramatic altercations with villains every other day of the week, we would believe that of an animated policeman, because the rules of story reality are that conflict must exist at every turn. In fact, because the rules are thus set an animated policeman who has truly ordinary adventures (eg. endless paperwork) would seem odd, out of place, and unnecessarily boring.

So then I thought it was time to take out the sketchbook and start pulling out ideas for a character whose day I could create concepts for.

To start out with this new approach, I pulled out some ideas from the sketchbook I created especially for this assignment. Most of the sketchbook consists of experimentation with textures and colors and with cutting and pasting images. Texture and vibrant color are things that I am not especially good at, and therefore things I want to try to implement in this assignment. Lisk Feng’s artwork is going to be something to reference while working on this project, especially her digital rendering techniques.

One of the pieces in my sketchbook that I wanted to reference especially was the alien bar scene. I had included a multitude of characters which I created in this course, and it therefore is an excellent resource. I am also drawn to the woman in the green fur parka from a different illustration. She seems to fit the atmosphere of the bar illustration. This is when I chose to move away from the teacher and policeman concepts from before and use the more whimsical elements I had come up with in the sketchbook during the previous exercises.

All that remained was to think of the everyday of one or more of these characters experiences. In the original drawing, the man in the red cap was the main focal point, and therefore the main character. I imagined that this was a sort of “Call to adventure” scene and that the red cap man is a human traversing the galaxy and that the android conversing with him is cross with him because he refuses to live up to some sort of responsibility. What would the everyday of this character be? The thing I liked in the first drawing was that he dresses in what we would consider a normal way, in contrast with the oddness of the rest of the characters. So I started drawing the same character in some very odd locations that he adventured to.

Or not necessarily adventured since this is supposed to be about the everyday. So instead of an adventurer, I thought of a story about a human living among aliens, still doing normal things, just in a different context. I kept one aspect of the adventuring: the fact that he lives in a spaceship. But I chose to  give him a real occupation and made him a mechanic. Given that this is sci-fi, I thought the job would be just as relevant on a far away planet as it is in the real world, if not more.

Then, I simply constructed his day the same way I constructed the panels for the teacher and policeman. (1) Waking on ship, (2) Landing ship in port, (3) Walking the rest of the way to work, (4) At the auto shop, (5) Spending time with friends, (6) Turning in.

For the second one, I drew the daily life of an android. The original drawing left me with a lot of room for characterization for the android, and the second time I drew it, I went for something a little more regal looking, especially once I added color to the robe. The effect had me thinking of a nobleperson. Perhaps the android is a part of a planet full of sentient computers, and she is a diplomat currently traveling to other planets on behalf of her people. While traveling she strikes an unlikely friendship with a human, whom she feels the need to check on from time to time because of his tendency to get himself into trouble.

(1) Waking from charging, (2) Planning out the day (with holograms), (3) Diplomatic meeting, (4) Digitizing (paperwork, but without the actual paper), (5) Checking up on the human, (6) Back to the charging port.

For the third character, I took a different approach. Instead of a regular-looking human living in an odd context, I drew odd characters in a very familiar context. I closely mimicked the panels for the school teacher from above, changing only the fact that all the characters are one-eyed, green aliens.

 (1) Waking up, (2) Brushing teeth, (3) Breakfasting, (4) Driving to work, (5) Teaching, (6) Spending time with friends.

My favorite character and panels were the ones for the android. Her character intrigued me the most, and I felt that there were quite a few directions to take the illustrations from where I left them, so I selected those panels for further development.

I already had one solid set of sketches, so all I had to do for the first concepts was to photograph and redraw them in photoshop. After my first set was finished, I started creating alternative compositions for each panel. All in black and white, of course, since I would decide on colors later.

For panel one, which shows the beginning of her day, my first idea was to put her in a pod instead of a bed. Because she is a robot, and therefore needs to charge, not sleep. For the second option, I forwent the idea of showing the character entirely in favor of showing the world she lives in. In films and comic books, this is called an establishing shot, an it is good for showing context. The third option is simply a re-thought version of the first.

The second panel shows the android planning out her day. I had liked the idea of using holograms and her interacting with them, since they would bring some visual interest to the panels. In the first and second panels I played around with the composition a bit, and in the third I went in a completely different route, and took a closer shot of her expression.

The third panel is all about her work as a diplomat. She is in a meeting with a few other colorful characters. I struggled with this one a bit. First I put them around a table but I thought it looked a bit mundane, then I set them in a circle, but it looked a bit sparse, and lastly I changed the camera angle so that we look at the android from the back. It looks a bit sinister, I think. Though that might just be the choice in color palette and the fact that it is darker in order to be able to see the holograms.

In the fourth panel, we see her writing out a report. The first idea was nice. I drew her in an office surrounded by glass windows, but then I thought of the fact that it was a bit odd that an android would need to type. So I changed the holographic laptop to a sort of arrangement where she simply presses her palms to the desk and the information transferrers straight from her mind to the system. But sadly, I thought this was a bit too abstract, and brought back the “laptop”, this time in a more playful position, screeched out on some sort of couch.

The fifth panel shows her with her human friend. In the first they seem to be having some sort of conversation in the mechanic’s shop. In the second, the human is probably dragging her somewhere to get her to loosen up. And in the third the android is visiting the human in his own ship.

The last panels mirror the first ones. Panel one mirrors the first one but from a different angle, panel two and three mirror the first ones, but they are rendered for nighttime.

After creating all of these options, now I had to choose the best ones for the coloring stage. From the first panels I chose the one with the urban landscape because I think an establishing shot is needed. From the second panels, I chose the close up first, because it feels more personal and it clues us in that this series is about this particular character. The third panel I chose because it was simply the best composed. The fourth I was not sure about at first, but I decided I liked the playfulness of the pose, since it seems out of place for an android to take such a human position. It gives a bit of insight into the character. The fifth I liked the best because It not only gives insight into the main character, but also the supporting one. And the last one I chose because I wanted to show both the idea of the charging station and the fact that the world outside has multiple moons.

Next came the coloring. I wanted to try coloring digitally using limited color pallets, as I had learned from a video with Lisk Feng. I chose three color palettes with three colors each, then proceeded to color in the black and white drawings in Photoshop.

The muted primary color palette was… fine. But not stellar, the colors ended up a bit too muddy. The green and teal color palette on the other hand, was vibrant and energetic. I thought it fit very well with the alien theme, while also not relying on the green alien stereotype because I had made her blue instead. The warm color palette was also nice, but I thought it looked a bit too heavy. The warm colors would have suited a different sort of planet better, one with sand dunes or red rock, not a sleek city full of skyscrapers. The red makes the city look toxic and polluted. Therefore, I chose to stick to the greens and teals going forward.

Next, I started building on the textures with textured Photoshop brushes and refined some of the edges for a more finished look.

Establishing shot

Planning out the day

Meeting with dignitaries

Writing out daily report

Checking up on the human

Charging up

I am overall happy with the final result, though the drawings could use a little more refining. It was interesting to see where the ideas came from. If I had not cut and pasted all those drawings in the exercises for this assignment, this character would not have existed. She was not among the characters I had used before, she was new. Born from a unlikely series of creative events. It was a process I hope to recreate again in the future when developing new ideas.

In conclusion, I feel I have learned a lot from this assignment and this course. I have learned to truly engage with my sketchbooks and to find a dialogue with them. Before, I would simply fill sketchbooks and then occasionally flip through them when I remembered that I had them, but that was the extent of it. I would plan out certain drawings in my sketchbooks by making thumbnail sketches and studies, but I didn’t use the sketchbook as  a tool for experimentation, or for idea generation. Yes, I would sketch out ideas when I had them, but I did not know how to use the sketchbook to truly conceive new concepts for a certain brief. I did not know to question those initial decisions and then ask “What if…?” to turn them on their heads, creating something completely new.

These are things I will remember from here on out, and things I hope to apply in my daily sketch booking and in my every project from now on.