2D Animation Processes (Flash Concept)

(My initial character designs when it was at the spring stage)

Flash Concept 

For the next few weeks I will be working on a Flash project that we have been set to work on in 2D. For the project we must complete a 30-40 second creature comfort style animation that contains a voice recording (that we must record), with the theme being 'My life in falmouth'. As well as the finished animation we must also hand in a full pack of pre production work containing concept work, storyboards, animatic and background work.  

I started off my idea with thinking about what kind of voice and topic I wanted to portray in my animation, obviously I knew that it had to have a theme of 'my life in falmouth', but there are so many variations on this topic I could basically do what I as long as it suited my character voice. So I decided to do one of two topics one being Tourism and the other being Car parking Tickets, im still not totally decided on either one because I want to see what the voice recordings are like for each one, so iv'e developed an idea which can be used for each one.  

My character designs started off around the idea of a toy or mascot in someones car, either suspended from the interior mirror like an air freshener, or as a figure on stuck on the dashboard. As you can see above I originally had the idea of a spring (sort of like a slinky character) but I soon realised this would be hard to animate on flash so I started drawing the character in a more solid form as you can see below. 

I then began to look at colours for the character as you can see below and quickly realised that black and white would be brilliant for a cornwall mascot (something a tourist may have in their car). 

After I had sorted what colour and I wanted my character to be I moved onto looking at what the character would look like in reality, by doing a series of turn arounds and character measurements in terms of how many rings would be in his body. 

The image below is a little model of my character I made out of plasticise to see what it looked like in reality, which I find always helps me to get a better understanding of what I want my character to be like.  

Backgrounds

For my background I had two ideas that you can see in my drawing below, as I explained before I will be deciding which one to use once iv'e done my voice recording, so that my character can react to it's background depending on what the recording indicates.     

But the one thing I do know is that I will be using a real photo like the one iv'e taken below. 

(Voice Recording I will recording my voices this weekend and plan to interview my relatives from up North, who will be perfect for the tourism vibe I might portray and will be putting this to an animatic in the next week, which I will post on here.)