Colours

As my part of the animation will be the marriage and the honey moon, I need to get happy atmosphere with the colours. For the background a will use mostly bright colours. Most of the scenes will be outside, so there will be lots of green and blue for the sky. On the very far background there will be some grey mountains with some snow on the top. The grey colour will nicely show the distance between the foreground and the mountains.

I've done some research for Japanese buildings and I've noticed that a lot of them have reddish or brown colour. That's very good, because when I'm going to use those colours together with other colours, they're going to create very nice contrast.

For the characters we've discussed in the group meeting that the main character will be black domino with white dot. I've also done some research for the Japanese wedding clothes and I've noticed that males are dressed black and females white. That will work perfectly for the animation, as the main character will already be black. The bride will be complete reverse of her partner, white domino with black dots.

Most of the scenes in my part of the animation will be during the daylight. However, there will be one scene indoor, so I'm going to use dark warm colours to create the romantic feeling of the evening.

Research

My part of the animation will be wedding and and honey moon.

I've looked at some Japanese buildings where weddings happen. I will create similar type of building, so the animation is more convincing. Here are few images I found showing those buildings.

Second group meeting

In this group meeting we've focused more about details. We've talked about the transitions between each person's part. We've decided to keep whole animation flowing in one pace and the transitions between people will some objects on the foreground that will move across the screen covering it for a moment.

We've also talked about the backgrounds. What colours and technique we're going to use and how detailed it's going to be. We've decided to keep it in 3 layers, so each layer will move at different pace creating this 3D feeling. For this meeting I've created a sample drawing of how I see the backgrounds.

Each person also has prepared a storyboard for their parts. Other team members have pretty good ideas and I think the whole animation is going to work fine. The only thing we have to discuss is the ending and beginning of each part. Each person has to finish their part in exactly the same looking frame as the next person is going to start.

Here is my storyboard:

First group meeting

During the first group meeting, two more people have joined, so now we have nine team members. That is perfect number, because now everyone will get exactly 20 seconds to animate. I was worried that this number of people will make it harder to get one strong idea. However, I was pleasantly surprised. Everybody has worked really hard and gave sensible ideas. For the meeting I brought some images of what kind of pictures are in my head while I'm listening to the music.

Those images were to help other members to picture how I see this music.

During the meeting we've talked about our main character. We wanted it to be a simple shaped character. We've decided that domino will be very good.

We have stacked to the theme of journey, but our idea developed to the whole life of our character, where he travels. As the music has a very Japanese style we've decided to start the animation in Japan with the birth of our character and to end in Japan as well, where our character dies. the aging of the character will be shown by dots on his body - each year will be new dot. We've divided whole song into nine pieces, 20 seconds each. Each team member will be working on a different piece and show different adventure. Also each 20 second section will be different season. It can be easily shown using right colours: green for spring, yellow for summer, red for autumn and white for winter.

The section I will work on will be character's marriage and honeymoon. For the next meeting everyone will draw a rough storyboard showing what they intend to do for their piece of animation.

Choosing the music and getting into groups

The music I've chosen is 'Hyperventilation' by Apocalyptica. I think it's very powerful piece of music. When I was listening to it I already had a vision of a potential story. There are two main sounds that I found in this song. The first one is very low and slow and the second one is high and fast. Those two sounds are mixed together through out the whole song. The first sound is like big bear slowly walking through the forest while the other sound reminds me of bees. The whole song is like a fight between those two sounds and the story that came into my head is the bear trying to steal the bees' honey and he gets attacked. That was my very first idea and it wasn't the final one.

After we've listened every body's songs I've decided to work on a piece of music called 'Flying into Tokyo'. This is very calm and relaxing piece of music. There were seven people in my group and after a little chat we've decided that the main theme of our animation will be journey.