Playground Scene Concept Art

This week we were given the brief for our motion studies project, an 8-second sequence wherein we have to animate children playing on playground equipment. This entailed creating character designs, designing an easy art style to animate quickly with, and drawing up a sequence of thumbnails and a layout of the environment.

I wanted each character to be colourful and unique, so I worked hard to create individual colour palettes for each character. When I had drawn all of them, I did a line up of both the boys and the girls. This was fun as I don't normally draw children, and it was interesting creating different personalities for them that showed through their outfits, hairstyles and attitudes.

Next came the layout design. I practiced drawing playground equipment using reference I found online, before creating a simple playground scene. I didn't want the viewer to be distracted by the background since the movement of the characters is the focus of the piece, so I made the background very simple, surrounded by cloud-like bushes to allude to the playground being in some kind of clearing.

Finally, the thumbnails. Originally I had been confused by the brief and mistakenly believed that the animation would be a minute long, so I began developing a narrative. However, this had to be simplified in order to fit into an 8-second slot, so the original story (a shy boy coming to the park and the other children dragging him onto different equipment to try it out) was cut short. Instead, I focused on a bully character fighting this boy instead, and the other kids leaving their games to attempt to pull the two boys apart. While I was told this would be a complex piece of animation to produce, I am willing to try it and prove that I understand the way the body moves well enough to construct a convincing fight scene. It will also be a chance to try something new as it is something I haven't tried to do before.