"Get a good idea and stay with it. Dog it, and work at it until it’s done right."
- Walt Disney
Since the deadline for the proposal is drawing closer, the first draft for a logline and treatment, as well as character design(s) had to be finished - and here are the results:
Titel: Breather
Initially I decided "Color Splash" for the titel, since that would have reflected and described the literal or visual change happening. But ultimately I decided against that and found a titel that fits more to the message, in my opinion.
Logline:
A young girl's dull and tiresome life suddenly gets turned around when mysterious colorful cracks start appearing in the sky. She decidesto take it upon herself to investigate them.
Treatment:
Iris drags herself home from work. She is stressed and tired. The world around her appears dull. Gray. A constant stream of people moves around her without any regard to anyone else, merging into one black mass. Skyscrapers stand imposingly around her, obscuring almost everything above.
Something falls onto Iris' nose. Thinking it is just a raindrop she looks up, expecting dark rain clouds looming above. Instead she finds a bright and colorful crack in the sky. She can see a strange exotic landscape through the crack. Unfamiliar with such an event, she starts panicking and frantically looks around, but no one else seems to see anything out of the ordinary. Looking back to the crack, she notices that it opened further, starting to spread onto the buildings and seemingly vanishing into a nearby alley.
Iris slowly approaches the alley. She carefully peeks around the corner to see if there is anything harmful. She makes her way closer to the crack, bit by bit. Although she is in awe and curious what exactly the crack is, at the same time she is still uncertain. She hesitates, but decides to get even closer. What does she have to lose? A bright light envelops her.
When she opens her eyes she finds herself in an entirely different place, an entirely different world. Everything shines in different colors. It is nothing like she has ever seen before. Nothing compared to the black, white, and gray world she has known up until then. She starts to wander around, approaching the edge of the forest she landed in. Iris finds a cliff and sits down at its edge, taking in the awe-inspiring view, while absorbing all the colors and energy around her, literally. She feels like she is relaxing for what feels like the first time in forever.
Iris sits there until well into the night, before she stands up, gives the scenery below one last glance, and walks back to the crack she came through. She hesitates once more, but she lets herself be carried back by the bright light, determines to face her life and whatever problems may await her wih new vigor.
(This is already a revised version of the treatment, because I noticed that I still used the wrong pronouns at some places (I wrote the first version without any specifically gendered character in mind, and thus used "they", but changed it to "she" in hindsight))
Character design(s):
Since I had a pretty definitive idea for the character herself since the beginning, I decided to try out different color pallettes, to see what would work best.
In the end I decided for my first design, the one on the upper left, since I really liked the warm colors as they are a great contrast to the previous cold gray look.
Because a large part of my animation will feature the world being gray, black and white, I simply turned the previous colored designs into a grayscale. This was also a great way to check the values and see if there is enough variety in them.
Since these are my first versions and designs, they are bound to change during the development before starting the actual animation. In fact, I already worked on some redesigns for the character, but I will hold onto them for now, since I still need to scan them, therefore, I will dedicate one of the next posts to them.
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