Statera - animated short pre-production

At the end of the first year came our biggest assignment yet. To make an animated short of 1 minute or more (not alot more. to protect the students from getting into way to much work). I've had the idea for my own short a long time now and wanted to make it for its abstract and weird Aesthetics/design.

The basic idea was to have two planets floating in orbit ( where on the one planet there would live a race of sophisticated gentleman complete with top hat and tea cup and the other planet would live a race of anarchy driven creatures. And somewhere in the middle they would meet/get into conflict. It was clear that i had to work some kind of plot in all this but this was where the idea started.

So i started to write a script, made some sketches, a style tryout and a moving storyboard. This is how it looked like.

So i had some mixed feedback. especially with the little red guys. One teacher thought it was about colonizing and another thought that the hat was a brainwashing machine (though it was suppose to be a symbol for the sophisticated side) And a third thought i was comparing people with animals (the red guys being the animals). I didn't want my short to be about those things and that was never the way it was suppose to about. So i made a second moving storyboard.

The short made more sense now but people were still taking a lot of mixed things out of it and even though i wanted for people to have their own interpretation, this was going to far. So i sat down and addressed the problems.

I made the red guys more like humanoid and dialed the amount of people on both planets down a little. I also changed the story and events alot. First made really smal thumbs in order to get every thing on one line with the plot.

And after being satisfied with that i made the third moving storyboard!

And by the time i finished this it was high time to start animating so i went with it.Next time i will post the final animated short in full HD.

Thijs out-