Creative Futures Two: 11 Second Character Animation Competition

I've decided to enter an animation competition I found on google. It's a competition where you're given 11 seconds of a voice recording and you have to animate a character to it. Anyone can enter and there is a new one every month. The winner gets an 'eCritique' from a professional animator from animationmentor.com 

There's also a forum where you can post your work in progress and gain feedback, which is invaluable. 

The voice recording for this months competition is-

"Please don't think we're ungrateful for your enthusiasm Mrs Crawley but there comes a time when things are best left to the professionals. And I really I really must go. Good day."

My first thoughts were to have 'Mrs Crawley' infront of some sort of scene where she'd tried to do something herself for the lady talking but it had gone completely wrong. Or she tried to do a job in some sort of profession. 

So I looked up professions and the ones that most interested me were architects, pilots, dentist, doctor, engineer, journalist, nurses and surgeons. I thought of things like, Mrs Crawley could be stand in a pilot suit infront of a wrecked plane, or dressed as a surgeon covered in blood, architects blue prints that didn't make sense etc. I tried to imagine the other lady's role in each of these and in my mind she didn't suit many of them. 

So then I looked at some possibilities that I could relate to and there were three things that came to mind. Gardening, painting and decorating, and building work, these are something I enjoy when I have spare time. The voice recording reminds me a bit of when I was younger and liked to surprise my parents by painting a room by the time they got home from work (something they may have thought about doing at the weekend), which was somewhat very messily finished due to my lack of experience. Or I thought I'd tidy the garden up a bit by 'weeding' and 'pruning' much to my Mum's horror I would pull out plants and flowers that she liked and cut  bushes and roses the wrong way at the wrong time of year, again through lack of experience. I've yet to do the same with building work, I've always had my Dad's company for those! 

 I decided that I would base this animation on one of those experiences so that I could understand the situation a bit better. I chose to do the painting and decorating as it would be easier to demonstrate visually than the gardening one and the building one.  

Mrs Crawley would think that she was doing the other lady a favour and surprise her by adding a bit of colour to one of the walls in the lady's sitting room as she had heard her talking about the possibility of having it done. 

And so I created the backgrounds..

Initial sketch in sketchbook

Straightening certain lines up digitally

Primed the image and digitally traced the original pencil marks

Added the colour to show the paint job by Mrs Crawley.

I decided to only use colour for the paint to emphasize the mess made!

This is the scene that Mrs Crawley will stand in. 

Bad door and door frame.

Oversized lamp

I drew both of these in the same scene together but the light was way too big so I made both drew them separately digitally.

This is my newly digital drawn door and door frame based on my original sketch.

And this is the redrawn table and lamp.

I then positioned them both back in one scene together with much better proportions

And finally added the messy paint job. This is the scene in which the lady will be standing. 

Overall I'm really happy with both of the backgrounds and the effect of paint has worked out better than I had imagined it!