I See Faces - Character Development, Storyboards and Feedback

Here I have experimented with how to draw eyes. I like the flat base and curved top but I think the eyelashes are too heavy. I think I need to simplify this down so that it makes it clearer to see when the person is blinking.

The idea behind this gif was that the macaroni cheese would continuously fall through the frame like rain. One concern I have is that not one individual character stands out and if all the expressions were the same, this could look quite monotonous and boring. I think this would be challenging to produce because there are so many separate moving components that need to work in unison and look totally continuous. 

This is an idea for a yawning/napping character - it is very simple and would require very few frames so I think I will use this as a backup for if some of my gifs take longer than expected to make and I have limited time to produce a final one. 

This is my storyboarding for the pepper gif where I am trying to figure out how this can loop. I figured this out in the orange drawings and moved this on into a more detailed storyboard on the right. I think the number of frames needed for this animation will depend on how fast they will be played and how jerky I want the transitions to be. I will need to keep storyboarding to refine this more. 

This is some continued character development through drawing for the playful dog. I have circled the one I want to progress with - I think that getting rid of the mouth and keeping the eyes far apart makes the face look more innocent. I wanted to capture how dogs can be mischievous and playful but still look totally innocent.

These are some rough sketches for animation ideas. The idea is that someone throws a ball of paper to the bin, the dog runs in, jumps and catches it and then runs back on itself out of the frame. It then repeats. I will need to storyboard this to make this clearer in my head. 

Media experiementation - I like the texture of the brush pen (centre) and I think the simple line work of the pen drawing in the top right would also work well in an animation. I went out and bought some peppers to draw from observation to give me a better idea about form and how a pepper looks from different angles. 

This is a more developed storyboard of the pepper gif. I have added in a part where the frame zooms in on the facial expression. I don't want to change or exaggerate the facial expression inside the pepper because I am just using what already exists so I am having to fins other ways to make this more intense and dramatic. 

Storyboard for dog gif

I am worried this might be too complex because these eight frames only show the key positions and not the transition frames between them. I will consider making the dog enter from one side and leave from the other side to avoid the extra frames where it walks back on itself. I feel this is overcomplicating the animation but not actually adding anything beneficial to it. 

Feedback

During  a peer feedback session, I presented my ideas and the drawings I had done so far to the rest of my group and they then highlighted areas which they thought I could progress with. They liked the idea of the pepper gif and agreed that it would be good to experiment with photography because I had not really done much with photography before. 

This quick chalk drawing from the initial stages of my project attracted some unexpected attention. A few people in my group really liked this and thought it would be really effective if it was just fading in and out, maybe even suggesting a personification of the wind or making it more haunting and ghostly. I do like the delicate texture of this drawing but I feel that I now have quite a clear idea for the three gifs I want to create so I probably won't take this suggestion any further unless something goes considerable wrong with my current plans.