Since I'm doing animation, I feel pressure to start right away, so I started immediately with planning the design of the protagonist! After that, I can build the framework for the film intro around the character. Since I wanted both the style to be simple for my own convenience and the character to be curious in a childlike way, I decided on an orange cat! The breed is technically a Tabby cat, but they are known to be the most mischievous cats out there. Much like how black cats relate to the supernatural, orange cats are known for their few playful braincells jumping around in their heads like a jingle bell. His main flaw and redeeming quality is that he is a child! To make it more fitting, making the protagonist a child would at least create enough context for the young audience to know their personality without needing to notice the orange fur patters, which may be hard to notice with everything being filled in with purely values and no hues.
The first design choice, I wanted to make the design uniform so that consistency would be easier to do. However, I realized that this would be the complete opposite to the cat's personality, so I decided to let loose a little. Make him have a bit of floof! Exaggerate his expressions as much as possible! Give him simple, loose clothing! This would make it so that not only the cat's design but also his lively movements and cartoonish exaggerations fit the bill. The initial concept is the first image, as the redesign is the second.
Here is the part where I start to get agitated.
I get up to film reference shots for the animation in my room. They were a lot of loose ideas that I wanted to add in, which featured a bunch of close-ups or POV shots for the cat rummaging around a bedroom. I even drew perspective lines on my arm to make it easier for me to decipher the reference in the future (although permanent sharpie was the first thing I saw, so I learned to use maybe makeup next time if I didn't want to be scrubbing soap on my arm six times in a row). I compiled some here, but due to being uncomfortable showing my face due to private reasons, I took some out for this specific post.
I then mapped the scene I had in mind with a storyboard, going from top to bottom, left to right. I filmed each panel with my phone to get an idea of each shot's timing, and this storyboard makes up around 30 seconds.
All this was rushed in one day. However, after taking a long nap the next day out of exhaustion, I realized that if I continue to do all this by ear out of crunching for time, then I won't know where I'm going in the first place. I need to do more research on the genre and look at some film intros that fit contemporary fantasy. I need to plan out a basic plot and think of an efficient way to introduce the story. In the next few blog posts, I'll observe film intros, and the next I will think of a plan of what I will do in the first place. If I don't prepare myself and this project, then it will take longer to do from the planning I would have to do midway and the mistakes I would make along the way. I got too ahead of myself!
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