Evidence Gallery
Here you can find all the visual development works of this project and a little description of each image
UPA Style Reference
The biggest inspiration in terms of style of the UPA cartoon style. We will discuss in more detail the various direction of this art style and animation language that we want to adapt to our story.
Motion Reference
We want to apply the techniques that made the UPA style distinctive. This means a simpler animation that requires a smaller framerate with repeatable movements (Film.Animation.Sound. 2011). One example of this is character's walk cycle like in Dexter's Lab (fig. 2). Another important aspect of their movement is that they're "based on feelings" (Docter, cited in Animation Obession 2021) that we would explore in much more depth. Since our story would involve a lot of clue-giving through expression of emotions, this exaggeration would be a good fit stylistically and aesthetically
Character Design
Our victim and suspects designs are largely based on the UPA style, with a little modern twist. They are stylized, iconic and flat (fig. 10, fig. 13), but maintain an anatomy closer to that of an actual person (fig. 8, fig. 9), but they are also decorated with simplified colors with the addition of distinctive, suggestive line (fig. 11, fig. 12). This style would help us narrow down the work load, make sure the consistency between the keyframes, and practice creative freedom with more comfortability. (Filmanimationsound 2011, Animation Obsession 2021). Color also plays an important part in our characters. Since each episode is the story of one character's perspective, we want to highlight their uniqueness to the max by using a monochromatic palette (fig. 10).
Set Design
We are captured by the playfulness of the UPA set design style, where often places and objects are drawn in simple "graphic abstraction" (Indiana University n.d.). Geometric shapes aren't clean cut and are allowed asymmetry (fig. 12, fig. 13, fig. 14). Interestingly, during the 1920s Art Deco was also a mainstream influence on how some Western countries aesthetically shaped, and it was "clean", "strong", and "organized" (The Art Story n.d.), especially known for its geometric patterns (Schenker 2021). We want to incorporate this historical feature into our world building as well, mainly via furniture and wallpaper designs.
Character Sketches
Below are the early version of our characters. You can see the applications of shapes and several experimental anatomy forms in these versions. Eventually, we navigated towards the slim-built character designs that were popular in 1920’s fashion magazines and incorporate the distinctive characteristics of each suspect into the design.
Character Descriptions & Design
Once we were happy with the ideas we had in the sketching phase, we started digitizing the character designs. Below you can see the characters with their detailed description, in various poses and different facial expression to showcase how this character will look like when animated.
Character Structure & Turnaround
Get to know our characters better by checking out more details on our characters' structure and turnaround! These are some basic details on how to build our characters and how they look from all angles (as well as some notes!)
Characters Dos & Don'ts
Our characters are all built differently and all have their distinctive quirks and features, therefore, here are some notes on how to draw/animate our characters
Background Concept Art
Here are some concept art for our backgrounds, characterized by monochromatic colors, black lines to define the furniture shapes with exaggerated perspective.
Prop Design
Here are some design of the props used in our production. The props are designed in UPA style with a life of their own!
Animatic 1
This is the first version of our animatic, based on the pilot script. In this first animatic, we can visualize the main scenes and motions of the characters, synced to the voice audio.
Animatic 2
This is the second version of our animatic. We have added some fully animated scenes and updated the animatic according to changes of the script and new audio.
Animatic 3
This is the third version of our animatic. In this version, the episode is fully animated and is used as the reference for the next stage, which is the coloring and clean up.
Animation Tests
We have begun our animation process with scene 1,2 and 3. And here are the scenes that we have animated, including 2 steps of the process: blocking with the key poses and then adding the inbetweens, and with each steps the animation is updated to be more appealing and interesting.
