Telling Tales: Week 1 - Project Brainstorming

I decided to partner up with Dan on this project because I want to learn to animate on Maya and Dan wants to improve on his pre-production work. So far, it has gone well in terms of brainstorming, and having a partner speeds up my decision making process, especially with this inventive idea of choosing the title by coin tossing. We ended up with the title 'The Message'. 

On the right hand side of the image below is a brainstorming page that I did after reviewing what I've discussed with my partner. Both of us like the idea of incorporating the primitive way of passing down messages through smoke signals, and through association we chose the native American culture to be the theme of our animation. We are especially interested in their religious belief, but decided to focus on researching shamanic practice. 

From left to right: Shamanic practice research and brainstorming page

List of character's states and motives based on superficial interpretation that has helped us to decide on the rough storyline. This serves as a guideline to develop the project, and hopefully the finalised idea will be better.

Story brainstorming and character roughs

Dan's focal character is the Shaman, and that's how he looks like. Not so much of an energetic character. We are planning to make him stay put throughout the animation while performing a ritual.
He is sly because he does not understand what kind of ritual he is doing, but tries to act like a professional when performing the ritual.

The shaman final design

 Initial designs of the kid character before doing secondary research. They all look plain and similar to the designs in Disney's Pocahontas mainly because of the hairstyle.

Not satisfied with the first few sketches, I tried to put on headgears on the characters. Not quite the look that I am looking for although they look cool. These designs are more suitable for adolescent characters. Also, their facial features are more refined than those of a kid. I remembered that during Visual Language, we have to design a character based on basics shapes. So, I drew out a triangular shaped outline and tried to fill up its inside. I like the shapes, and someone pointed out that the triangular shape reminds him of a Tee Pee, which is the hut where the Indians live in.

I am already satisfied with the design inspired by Tee Pee, but I tried to look into something else such as Kachina dolls and the outfits that the Indian kids wear in the early 20th century. I choose to look at the 20th century simply because the photo references that I found are mostly taken in that period.

Designs inspired by Kachina dolls and some of Native American children's traditional outfits. I figured out the sloppy look for the character might spice up the element of surprise in the storyline. With the sloppy look, the audience will have low expectation from the kid, but they will be surprised that she can perform complex religious ritual that only the shaman can perform.

No.1,2 and 4: Developed stuck-on-cape design. I like design 1 the most, design 2 is a cleaner version of design 1 with slight changes.

No. 3: Carricature of a boy based on a reference image.