Character Colour Concepts

Some colour tests for our main character. I'm partial to #7, #8, #14 and #17.

Further Character development- the girl is taking shape

So with the initial sketches I pulled out some of my personal favourite features from both mine and Meg's Sketches which you can see in the kind of influence map below. Although I've made it clearer on the map which parts were the 'Hero' parts so to speak there was a little bit of experimentation with various heads on a body creating our first sort of character line-up.

These little girls were created back to front, D was invented first followed by C and so forth. But it would appear we inadvertently saved the best till last. Design A we agreed is our favourite. She is the most adorable design we have so far and with any luck her cuteness will serve to make her story all the more heart wrenching when the animation is completed. The next step is to test out her various outfits and colour them. Meg designed a few outfits previously and those will be trialed on the body. We will also be getting into the nitty-gritty of colour and textures in the style of our fifties cartoon art influences. 

To kick start a colour palette, Meg showed me a novel way to find the sorts of colours we were after. Taking the bright colour tones from our fifties kitchen influence map images, we then used a filter in photoshop called 'crystallise', which took out all the details and left us with this broken mishmash of the colours. These will be used to colour the girls fantasy home life of her imagination. The same filter was applied to a series of darkened post apocalypse images from the game 'Fallout 3' for the subdued colours we wanted for the little girls bunker reality. 

Having found some colour palettes and a general look for our character I went on to combine the two and created the initial test runs below. I also took the opportunity to correct the figure and add a few extra features such as frilly socks. She's looking pretty cute!

Character Development

So with a little word during a tutorial we realized we've got our priorities in the wrong order. Top of the agenda should be the character design. So with Meg's rather helpful influence map and inspiration from our art style between us we have produced the sketches below.

Her are some of Meg's thumbnail sketches including the deliberation as to how tall our character should be. We feel drawn to the design thats four and a half heads high. The girl looks old enough to understand some of the situation around her. The fear behind the Atomic age, but young enough to still have an air of naivety in the way she plays with her toys.

While Meg went about the thumbnails the traditional way I hopped to it with a graphics tablet drawing on the cartoons of the era. Beginning with faces and head shapes and slight variations in hairstyles before I moved on to bodies.

Heads

Bodies

Illustrator Work

After talking to Alan about 1950s animation backgrounds, a style which apparently is called 'Shaggy', I tried replicating it in Illustrator. I'm not entirely thrilled by it, Illustrator is a tricky program to wrangle so I cut quite a few corners. Looking at it shrunk down I see that my intention of making sure no two lines were perfectly parallel may have gone a little overboard. Oh well, live and learn!

Bunker - Initial Thumbnails

At this point I'm still quibbling back and forth regarding a private or public bunker. #4 and #5 were largely to establish the bare necessities for survival, and figuring out how to best use the limited space of a bunker. I'm not sure it's the very best use, as I foresee a lot of falling-over of chairs. What I gathered from these thumbnails is how there can be absolutely no wasted space in a bunker, so as well as feeling claustrophobic due to the low ceiling and windowless walls, it will also need to feel crowded by furnishings.

Dolls in the Dark Initial Bunker Resources

I've taken on the duty of designing the bunker interior for the animation; I'm planning to render it in a more realistic, 'gritty' style than that of the little girl's reverie to drive home the seriousness of the situation. So, obviously, I'm going to need some references, particularly as the closest I've ever been to 'subterranean' is the CGAA base room.

I've put together a major 'cheat sheet' for my own reference, but the file is huge - open at your own risk.

So, for your viewing pleasure, here's a slightly more geriatric-laptop-friendly version.

Bunkers are fun. I have fond  memories of playing in old block houses out in the marshes near my house, back when I actually went outside and ran about. World War and Cold War architecture has always been close by for me.

Basements and the like, not so much. The soil in my village has a hard enough time tolerating the foundations of above-ground buildings, so underground architecture is more-or-less out of the question. What I love about cellars is the sheer variety, from wine cellars to root cellars to data centres to places-where-people-put-their-stuff-to-forget-about-it. I'm not sure whether we want to go down the private shelter route or whether we want the shelter to be huge, as though it was a public building, so I'm keeping my options open.

Last but not least, there's this very informative bunker study by Michael Janzen. The accompanying article is excellent as well. It discusses the basic principles of nuclear-survival architecture, such as the importance of 90-degree turns in ventilation systems to keep irradiated particles from entering the bunker, and various building materials and the amount of them needed to block radiation.

Initial Idea

Our first solid idea (after many, many nonfunctional ones) was to look at the dichotomy inherent in the Cold War era - the dichotomy of hope and fear, of grand opportunities and ever-looming danger. With the success of the Manhattan Project, the world was looking at a new age of prosperity ushered in by nuclear power. The USA in particular was already booming from the Second World War, and the overall standard of living there was on the rise. This was evidenced in the ever-increasing amount of travel, including international travel by aeroplane. It was this that caught our interest, and we wanted to look at the slight irony of how wartime advances in aeronautics had benefitted civilian life, and the dark purpose those vehicles still carried out even after the war was over.

Initial Unscripted Storyboard (Note: Reads top-to-bottom, left-to-right)

The intention (which is a little hard to read, especially as I never got around to finishing this) was to depict a plane passing over a tropical island, and all the opulent holidaymakers that entails. It would then pass towards a series of coral islands, and the camera would 'detach' from the plane to reveal that it was a B-29 Supercarrier bomber, dropping the first atomic bomb on Bikini Atoll.

We scrapped this idea as it was lacking in any actual story content, and its commentary wasn't entirely clear.