Following on from the parallax illustration tests, I've started to wonder which direction I should take this project in... on one hand I'm very tempted to use my own style and have several illustrations animated to a narrated story, while on the other I really like the look of both the Darksiders and Borderlands animation styles, and would love to try my hand at something more like that.
I've been doing some reverse-engineering of the Borderlands style and have a pretty solid idea of how to replicate the techniques and get a similar result. The problem is that my finished animation would probably be exactly that: a similar result, as I'm struggling to think of anything new that I might be able to bring to that style.
What I might do is test a few illustrations out with the animation techniques I think I've learnt from Borderlands, to see if there's anything that I can take into my own art style later, to further enhance the final look of that. I'll see how it goes.
Anyhoo, now that I've decided to go with the narrated animation style, it's time to start throwing some ideas around and figure out exactly what kind of story I want to tell.
Whenever I get stuck at this stage of a project, I usually find it helps to put on a music playlist and do a bit of sketching until some ideas begin to flow. What I like most about this method is that as I sketch - characters, environments or whatever else - I'm constantly doing some vague storytelling in my head, trying to ground my drawings in some kind of reality. This results in a ton of ideas coming out and altering the sketches to some degree (sometimes for the better, sometimes not).
By the end of a few hours sketching, I had this guy:
His outfit and armour design is in reference to a picture I made earlier in the year "Witch Hunter":
I'd never really come up with any kind of story for this guy, nor an explanation for the artefact he holds; at the time I had just been playing around with some alternative fantasy genre designs and latched onto this one. I didn't even explain what made him a witch hunter, it just seemed like a good title at the time.
Now that I've found myself sketching out a similar character, I'm thinking this might be a good opportunity to start building upon the designs and maybe get some interesting storyline going. At the least, it's a style that definitely interests me - I'd be a fool to not pursue it.
I left my sketches alone for the night and returned with fresh eyes the next morning. I was still quite happy with the idea and had even spent a bit of time thinking of what storyline might fit this guy.
I knew that I needed to do something about the spear I'd given him, it looked like crap and didn't fit the bill. I remembered my thought process for the artefact design in the Witch Hunter; I'd thought of it as being made from some kind of living metal, like a relic item that possessed it's own powerful soul. Applying this idea to the new weaponry, I drew up and scrapped a few iterations of a living broadsword before settling on this one:
(I also sorted out a few of the errors from the first sketch and polished things a little)
I was enjoying the direction this character was going so I kept at it a while longer. I imagined him to be a witch hunter who comes across a corrupted sword which subsequently consumes his soul. It's certainly not an original story, you'll have heard it a hundred times before, but hopefully I can make it look and feel a little bit different.
I quickly sketched out another pose for the character, to try and gain some more understanding of him and this is the result:
I'd like to keep going with this one, so my next step is to get some storyboarding on the go, as well as doing a bit of technique experimentation within AE.
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