https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lqzgUYQ=/
With this project we were tasked with, in teams of 2-3 to create an short 50s animation around the lives of cats and dogs. Given this brief by the horniman museum they asked that:
‘We would like 40-50 second films that respond to ideas around domesticated cats and dogs, their
characteristics and behaviour, as well as their relationship to humans to accompany the “Cats and Dogs” exhibition’
Once forming a group we generated a few ideas whilst walking around the exhibits, focusing on cats and dogs we took more of a interest in cats as we all had experiences with cats and felt we could tell an interesting story with a focus on only one over having both.
We brought together different styles and media which portray cats in different ways. Bee and Puppycat, The amazing world of Gumball and Felix the cat in tv animation but also in film the aristocats, The Cat returns. In vidoegames there was animal crossing.
We brainstormed ideas together and brought up the scene from 101 dalmatians, where a few dogs are being taken on a walk and look quiet like their owners. We also had an idea based on how the cats are portrayed in ‘The Cat returns’ with human aspects, walking around on 2 legs, talking ect to explore cats and their lives.
We found the idea of cats looking like their owners and having a visual dynamic would be an interesting route to take so we focused on this when designing them moving forward.
I designed cat’s based on how a child would perceive the different breeds, One idea with this was how a tabby could be perceived as a energetic tiger!
For inspiration I looked at different Tv shows I watched as a kid, such as 64 Zoo Lane and the type of materials I would use when drawing such as crayons and felt tip pens, all with bright and vibrant colours. I also collected a variety of cat and kitten photos from pinterest for inspiration on different personalities for the cat designs I come up with.
I focused on exaggerating certain aspects of these designs so they’re more identifiable to a kid and family audience, such as a birman cat having a long neck and body or the rag doll being huge and fluffy.
With willow designing a few cats and their humans the team asked for me to finalise three of my own cat designs to bring forward, we chose these three: the black and white cat, the scared sphinx cat and the small calico cat. This was because we felt they had a distinct personality and would lead to fun actions between the cats and their owners.
I designed a human for the sphinx cat based on the idea of a loving paternal person protecting the scared cat from harm.
I felt the idea of a gentle old lady would work best as there would be a certain charm with an old person and their loved pet.
I then came up with these colour tests for the lady. I wanted to see what would work best with the sphynx cat as we wanted to show a dynamic between the cats and their humans, both in personality and character. To work of the cat’s purple tones I went with shades of green for the lady’s clothing as the colours are harmonic together, further empahsising their connection.
moving forward me and willow were tasked with coming up with backgrounds after choosing humans and their cats to work with, as a group we choose a few from willow’s designs and mine.
The old lady and sphynx cat’s home design, it was inspired by my own experience of visiting a few old neighbors in my childhood. What i remembered most definitely was the air of charm and homey-ness, it felt warm and i remembered the large collections of antiques and vintage style furniture and I wanted to incorporate this in to how I create this enviroment.
After some feedback from our clients we were asked to simplify the story so it was more synced together, they felt having 5 or more humans and their cats for only 50’s would be abit too much and whilst they liked the designs we would need to let a few ideas go so we have more of a better focus. For this as a group we choose a character which willow designed, we named them john for now, and whilst willow came up with the designs for the environments i came i with the redesigns of the cats.
For the redesign of the cats I based it off of willows three kitten designs, how they all had a few characteristics which were individual to them and I wanted to emphasis them.
She redesigned the character of john as one of the bits of feedback we recieved is we didnt have alot of diversity in our designs despite wanting to show this in our animation, we changed this by having ‘john’ be a person of colour instead.
After willow showed a design for john’s home to me I helped finalise a design for this afterwards.
I focused on the colours of each of the designs, more importantly would any be hidden or would any clash if animated in the backgrounds. They also asked for the backgrounds to feel more personalized so I added a lot of photos surrounding john and his cats, small momentous occasions and memories to hold on to which i felt he would frame and hang on his walls.
Brandon and yaw during this worked on story boarding the story and came up with the synopsis. Our first idea was focusing on the mischief the cats would get through daily and how as an owner you have a set responsibility when caring for them.
from this we brandon created a animatic and willow focused on sound design
main feedback from this animatic we got from our client was that the mischief the cats caused felt too large and slowed down the pacing, it also got misunderstood with what was happening and why such as the girlfriend arriving aswell as the antics the cats where going through.
As a result we created another animatic this time focusing on the girlfriend who we named autumn and john, creating a simple premise of autumn arriving for the first time and john gets worried as the cats don’t listen.
main feedback from this was that the ‘mischief’ the cats go through felt more cat-like though with the responsibility of owning a cat it felt the actions were more suitable for kittens so I updated the designs of the cats to reflect this change.
Going from left to right we named the kittens: Cookie, Cream and Custard. In these redesigns i wanted to focus on the kitten’s silhouettes and defined certain features which would help the audience to know their characters from eachother. With other kittens having tufts of fur and others having large whiskers. Whilst this happened Willow designed Autumn:
next we assigned eachother scenes for us to individually animate, i got scenes 5,9,13 and 22-23
some tests i did whilst animating
With these tests I wanted to work on my timing as well as movements and showcasing each character’s personality. Whilst I found it fairly easy to animate the kittens I had more trouble with animating the human characters especially in certain movements like moving towards the camera whilst holding something. To combat this I drew out the movement and resized it closer to the camera each new frame to give the illusion of the character moving forward instead, slightly changing the arms and the placement of the kittens.
I was tasked with, after brandon and willow sorted out the final audio and film pieced together, putting the final audio track and film together aswell as creating the subtitles for the video as a srt. This included timing when the subtitles start an end aswell as creating a transcript for both subtitles and a descriptive text transcript of what happens. Whilst i was tasked with this last minute I was able to create all documents needed so that the animation is accessible to the audience.