Week 1- Research and planning

As the title suggests this week was dedicated to research. something I do at the beginning of every project. I began by going through the book of Thumbelina highlighting any and all potential assets that I could design.

There was a lot

I ended up with a potential,

• 17-20 characters
• 18  Sets/Environments
• 18-20 Props

Which I cut down to this list:

Characters: 10

• Thumbelina
• Prince
• Swallow
• Mother
• Toad mother
• Toad son
• Butterfly
• Field mouse
• Mole
• Flower Spirits

Environments: 10

Mother’s home interior and exterior (garden)

Forest –summer-winter

Tiny’s home x2

Swamp-stream

Field mouse home- exterior (one shot purposes)

Underground tunnel (one shot)

Swallows nest (white marble)

Props:

Varied throughout environments and characters

So I will  be designing the key assets from this list as well as picking a few of my favourites from the list. With that in mind I also produced a rough time plan:

though this is subject to change

Over Christmas I read Mike Yamda's Notes on his and Victoria Ying's process when creating there own stories (you can find it here). This featured a helpful style guide template, which I've used to help find a style for my project.

Style guide (unfinished)

I also referenced Rough Draft Jr and how they broke down colour and how they used it to tell their visual development process. So I set about making some colour keys for each scene in Thumbelina.

At this point, to help with colour keys, and just for general research I went through my first (but not last) research binge, where I find as may relevant books as possible and bookmark and scan a tonne of images.Firstly I looked into art of books for various animated movies:

The Art of Rio- for the colour keys and its extensive development of bird characters (for the swallow character), and environment work.

The Art of Ratatouille: For its night scenes and development of rat characters (for the field mouse character)

The Art of Mr Peabody and Sherman- For their colour work, specifically when representing  renaissance Italy and for how they integrate 3D block-outs into their development process.

I also looked into how I could represent Denmark in the 1800s, where this story is set. As I could not find photographs of that time, I looked into painters of that era. I came across these two books, Baltic Light- Early open-air painting in Denmark and North Germany and Christen KØbke Danish master of light. From these books I found that paintings of Denmark often had a warm yellow glow to it, something that I'd like to portray in the beginning scenes of my project.

With that In mind I  gathered some references of the types of environments I wanted for the Thumbelina story.

Though this is a good start I'd like to edit these later on, and drive the colour pallet by emotion and mood rather than just environments and seasons.

At end the week I started on my Thumbelina sketches, gathering some Initial reference:

And producing these sketches,

This is where my week ends but I've still got a lot of development to go with this character.