How My Idea has progressed

My ideas since last week started to develop slightly over the weekend, I had played around with my characters aesthetics and began thinking and asking myself questions such as, why does she look like this? How has she been able to maintain her appearance on her own without an adults help? And this lead me to start changing the hairstyle from a rather neat looking bob to a half up and half down look I made this design choice as when it came to her hairstyle and the post-apocalyptic world she would be living in it didn’t make sense for it to resemble finely brushed hair. The half up and down look is mean’t to signify her past self, her past life where her mother may of styled her hair for her. By having half of it down and messy hopefully shows that she still holds onto her past self but is unable to fix her hair herself. So her mentality is one sides better than nothing.
I’ve been inspired my Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke as well. This is because for this term I decided that I wanted to base my dissertation on an animation style (in regards to design and concept) on a subject area/artists that I wish to create work similar too. In Princess Mononoke I loved the spirit creatures that lived and protected the forest. For me I would like to take an element of this especially the ectoplasm like substance which the forest spirit seemed to be made from and have it leaking and squelching out of cracks in the earth. I would like this to symbolize potentially the earths ‘spirit’ that has now been freed due to the destruction of technology, or perhaps because of the damage humans have inflicted on the planet. I want the ectoplasm to then start to turn into new creatures, keeping the same texture but shifting form and sprouting eyes. Almost like evolution has decided to start all over again.
After speaking with Jon about my plan and ideas, I felt a lot more confident in what I had managed to come up with so far. We both agreed that it had a clear message it was addressing which was ‘balance’ as I wished to display this through my young girl character being the one who is able to bring nature, humanity and technology together peacefully. Without the need to destroy one another. I plan to show technology in this animation through a marble like sphere which the young girl and creatures will stumble across. She will initially be wary before realising she recognises the object (this is because it will be an object from her past, (a futuristic common household appliance). She will form her own quick bond with this sphere, however the creatures are scared and the sphere doesn’t recognize them as anything that ‘should’ exist and retaliates aggressively. The little girl is horrified and quickly shows that there is no threat. The sphere calms down and she is able to form a small group of friends between them all.
I think my story has definitely come along quite nicely but I need to make sure I start putting together a storyboard so I can visually try and depict my animation, this will also allow me to see what clearly needs to be changed. Something else that I have learnt while sketching for this project is that I was sketching my character all wrong, in regards to making her appear young, At first I couldn’t figure out where I was going wrong, so I decided to look up reference images of children such as anatomy, young Japanese girls (as this is what my character is hopefully going to represent) and realised I had gone about the proportions all wrong. So I started to resketch my character but this time carefully studying my reference material and made sure that the face was a lot rounder and I guess ‘heavier weighted’ around the cheeks to represent a younger and more innocent character, this includes making the nose smaller and less defined and the eyes rounder. I’ve played around a little bit with her clothing but not as much as I would potentially of liked to quite yet, I’m definitely set on the hairstyle and the new way of drawing the proportioned faces, but clothes is something that is still being considered. I have done brief research into ‘Japans kids fashion’ as well as looking at Studio Ghibli’s ‘Ponyo’ and ‘Setsuko’ from Grave of the Fireflies as reference material and saw a correlation between my real life sources and the fashion from ‘GoTF’ which are these pyjama like comfy trouser bottoms which I thought would be something my character would likely wear.

Inspiration: As I have stated previously, my inspiration will be coming from various ‘masters of Japanese animation studios’ which will hopefully work as a guide as I continue my journey to try and discover my way of animating but at the same time taking tips and tricks from those who are already incredibly successful. I think for me as an independent and young amateur animator I don’t see the harm of carefully studying these animators in order to improve myself and to hopefully be up there with the greats. Of course, I want to find my own style and my own way of doing things, but for now I really want to push myself to create something beautiful and meaningful.
Technique: I’m going to keep a sketchbook where I will hopefully have a lot of my initial ideas and sketches kept in which I will use to help kickstart my ideas and experimentations. I have already started to plan out my character, considering her anatomy and a little bit of her facial expressions. I will need to build on the characters facial expressions a lot more over this week as I really want to have a wide range of over exaggerated emotive expressions to play around with when it comes to animating. I will be animating in digital 2D animation style and hopefully show heavy influences from animation companies which I would one day love to work for.
Following on technique-wise, I’m planning on starting off with sketches, and then taking those sketches to a digital platform where I will continue my character development and poses until I’m at a point where I fully understand my characters anatomy, range of expressions and movement. I will then move onto creating a rough storyboard, which will then transpire into a finished storyboard which I will time to make sure it is no longer than 60 seconds. After further editing I will move onto my animatic which I will be creating in TV Paint. This will be my technique so far and when I’m further into the project I’ll be able to give more detailed updates when it comes to designing and creating the backgrounds and animating my character.
My Message: I want to be able to clearly get my message of ‘balance’ across to my audience through the power of animation, music and character archetype and narrative.

Research sources list: Googled images of previous characters from animations such as Spirtied Away,Ponyo, Wolf Children.
Development
This week I have progressed my project by starting from the very beginning of the animation process, sketching and coming up with ideas freely in my sketchbook as well as typing up short stories and impulsive ideas. This week has definitely been an amalgamation of initial thoughts and processes, coming up with mind maps on character traits, trying to understand how my character would react in certain situations as well as what my key message/moral is going to be. I’m at a stage in this project where I know what my message is going to be to the audience, I just now need to start taking steps forward to make sure my animation narrative is getting this message across clearly.
Strengths
My strengths within this project so far is having a good understanding of the message I am wanting to communicate, as well as having a clear enough design strategy, in regards to knowing how I want my final piece to look and the steps I need to take in order to reach my goal. I already have a rather good sense of my character, I feel as if I could already be inside her head and understand her characteristics and archetype. This will help me to be able to create a human connection between my character and the audience, for them to get to a point of empathizing with her.

Areas for Development
Areas within this project that I need to make sure I am developing next week is hopefully a set character design or at least a more stable design that I can start to work from as a base structure. I need to start to look into more characters and references which are relatable to the sort of character I am wanting to create. Next week I need to start solidifying my storyline, I will hopefully have some sub characters designed and a structure to my narrative which can mean the following week or even next week I can create a storyboard (even if it’s just rough) to work from and advance my designs.