Collaborative Brief - Loopdeloop - Ideas

I wanted to collaborate on an animation brief, I chose to work with graphic designer Roshan, who had skills in graphic design and animation. We looked through some animation briefs and the best and most suited to our skills was the LOOPDELOOP brief.

The brief was to create a looping animation, like a gif, that could play over and over again in a loop. There is new a theme for the competition every year, this years theme is CHICKEN. The animation must be based around the theme of chickens. This was perfect for us too work together on because it was a broad theme that could be approached from lots of different angles. It also could involve character design, which would be good for me to work on as my contribution to the animation.

Ideas:

• We sat down together and talked about ideas for the brief whilst I produced some quick roughs about what was being said.
• We knew we wanted to include a chicken character, we just had to decide on what it would be doing, what would be a good looping action?
• We thought about actions and gestures the chicken could make but it wasn't quite enough, we needed some sort of scenario. We even thought about the chicken head coming off, bouncing round the screen and then attaching back onto his head - this was way to random and doesnt make sense...
• Eventually we came to the 'jack in the box' idea. More like chicken in a box. The idea was to have a crazy looking chicken come jumping out of the box - the face warp and glitch and then go back into the box - looping over and over again.
• I liked this idea because it works really well for the loop, its a short action that we can play around with and make comical and funny.

• Thinking further on the box idea, we wanted to put and egg logo on the box. This then got me thinking and I had the idea to make the whole box into an egg...
• Make the chicken hatch from an egg that is a jack on the box. The egg could have a wind up handle on the side and work in the same motion as a jack in the box but appear as a cracking egg.
• We wanted too add sound effects to the animation - music for when the box is winding, sound effects of the handle winding and egg cracking, and then a squawking sound from the chicken as it springs out of the egg. 

• I made a quick story board to get an idea of the time frame, motions, and what imagery we will need to create for the animation.
• An important think to note will be making the last frame link back to the first frame to create an effective smooth loop.

• The things that needed to made where, A chicken, A egg jack in the box, and a simple shape based back ground.
• Because I was familiar with character design, my job was to create a lino printed chicken - lino because we wanted the aesthetic to be quite shape based and 2D - no tone shading or shadows. Also lino cuts are interesting to animate and will work well to glitch and twist up - because it is built up of lots of different sections that could be moved individually.
• Roshan was going to create the jack in the box, and the back ground - We wanted them to be made from simple digital shape, so they are straight forward to animate and keep the focus on the chicken character.
• We decided we would both work on the animation together at the same time, After we had both made all of our imagery individually. This would mean we can both have a say in how the animation will move and discuss what works as we go. Rather than one person make a judgement - we could reflect on each others ideas and not have to make changes that the other person had decided.