OatPC ep3 - Concepts

Okay, so here are various key shots within this next animation worked up as illustrations.
I think over all I'm pleased with them, but it's hard to illustrate when I'm wearing the animator's hat. There are several elements that I need to keep simple for them to be able to be animated easily. For example the Owl and the Cat (and the Whale) don't share the same textural qualities as the environment simply because if they did I would need to negotiate by hand each frame and how the texture would look as they moved their bodies... And I think it'd drive me mad! (This is why animation studio's are made up hundreds of people!)

Developments: The water; although it's the same coloured sandpaper textures as used in the previous episodes I've varied the opacity of the layers, so now you can see objects through the water; like the bottom of the boat, the oars and the whale!
The boat; as I mentioned in the previous post the boat was starting to look too simple, so I have re-designed it with the only reference from the poem I have; "Pea green..." I've used that idea quite literally and gone with a sort of pea pod look.

Potential nightmares: The fog.... although it'll look nice, it will need to be drawn frame by frame for it to have a fluid swirly motion. That's 25 frames a second, and a lot of tedious hours in store... But it'll be worth it!
The lantern's glowing light; I'll need to work on how that will work within Toon Boom.
The Whale's spout; same as the light, it'll need to be carefully negotiated to get the right kinda spray/splashy quality as in the last image. (I really wish Toon Boom could use different brush qualities like Photoshop!)

There are still a few more shots to figure out, then these will need to be condensed down into a manageable number of layers in Photoshop to be imported directly into Toon Boom. And then the motion begins!