Hollie wanted a very flat After Effects style animation for the program that the children will be watching on the TV in her film, so she asked me to do this as I knew how to use After Effects fairly well. She also wanted a similar style for the credits, so I decided to tackle all the character designs first. I needed to make a design for: a TV zombie, a TV woman (who role is to scream as she sees the TV zombie), the zombie boy, the zombie girl, the scared mum and the communist dad.
Hollie wanted the designs to be in the style of a 50′s cartoon, so I found the designs quite hard to do at first because they were VERY different from my personal style. However, after some practice and looking at a lot of references, I began to get the hang of the style so managed to come up with a few designs.
Here are the references I used for the following designs:
I used these reference to produce some initial designs of the zombie boy and zombie girl:
I don’t usually like leaving things this rough, but Hollie wanted some really quick rough drawings that showed the various 50′s cartoon styles, so I left them like this to meet her requirements.
Then we decided that, as she had a very specific idea of what the character designs were to look like, she would draw over any of my designs that she thought needed tweaking to finalise the designs. In this case, she drew over the boy just to neaten and round him off:
I then took these images into Illustrator and drew over them with the pen tool and coloured them with different shades of grey that I thought were appropriate and left them in a block colour style that had no line art (as this is the sort of style Hollie asked for). They had to be monochromatic due to the TV being an old black and white one. The directors also had a look at the final designs to make sure the the colours were okay, so I had to make a few minor adjustments.
I then did the same process with the TV zombie and TV woman, although Hollie already had quite a few designs she wanted to use for the zombie so we just ended up using on of her zombies. So, I mainly just designed the woman, but I had a go at designing the zombie anyway and below are some of the references I used:
I did a design for the woman using both of the styles above, as they were the style of 50′s cartoon women that Hollie liked the most.
After looking at my designs, Hollie decided to go for an in between on the woman design so that the woman had the top design’s head and the bottom design’s body. She also incorporated the nose and stitch from my zombie into her zombie design.
So Hollie drew over the bottom woman design and added the top ones head to it:
This was her zombie design with the new nose:
I then drew over both of these in Illustrator to make the final designs in the same style as the boy and girl:
Once again I asked the directors to check to see if they were happy about the colours and then made all the minor changes that they wanted.
The final two designs that I have to complete now is one of the dad and one of the horrified mum. They decided that they didn’t want the dad to be a communist in the credits.
Below shows the composited versions of the characters. I just did the animating really quickly to test out which bits had to be in separate layers, so the animation is quite amusingly terrible.
