Studio Brief 4: Apply

For our final brief of this module, we've been 'let loose' and allowed to do make a 5-10 second animation using any of the processes we've learnt so far on this course. It can be about anything we like as long as it responds to one of the key words: Surprise, Lateness, Love, Hate, Longing, Happiness, Fear. 
I thought about the words and came up with a few ideas for Surprise, Love and Fear and storyboarded a couple of them before finally deciding on 'Love'. I did some character designing and worked out how my characters would spin in circles.

 The animation was to be 5-10 seconds long, but my idea for Love in the storyboard seemed to take a lot longer than the length of the animation in the brief, so I cut the story short a bit while making the animation, and my animation was still a bit longer than suggested. My animation tells the story of a girl in a music box who is bored and sad because she's all alone on the shelf, then a second music box is placed on the shelf with a boy spinning in it and the two fall in love and spin together. Originally one of the music boxes was meant to break and then the girl would be fixed onto the other music box so that the two characters spin together forever, however this would have made my animation closer to 30 seconds+ and that was too long for the brief. 
I used music in the background of my animation, because they're music boxes and it seemed silly to not have music in it... The song is the opening of an acoustic version of Alter Bridge's 'Wonderful Life'.

Originally, I had wanted to make my animation using photoshop, and I created a couple of scenes on it at the beginning of the week, however I found that this took a long time, as well as it not always being easy to find a computer and tablet in the mac suites at uni, and as my deadline was quickly approaching, I decided to create my animation using a light table, a peg bar and animation paper, as I had enjoyed doing this in the pendulum project, and it would be a lot quicker and meant I'd actually be able to get it done on time for the deadline as it meant I could work anywhere with a table. 

If I did it again, I'd put in different camera angles, like I'd wanted to in my storyboard, and I'd try to add more personality to the characters and maybe make the girl try to reach out to the boy in some way...