Animation Planning-Genre Details

The genre of our animation is comedy, through the relationship of the two characters; Mr and Mrs Potato.

We have been looking at potato related jokes to include.

The above was our original idea, we have now changed the storyline. Our animation is now set in an industrial town where you can see smoke coming out of chimneys, and Mr Potato walking over a hill to get to work. The genre has changed from a comedy to a sort of dark humour.

The storyline is:

Mr and Mrs Potato live in an industrial like town, it's very dark and desolate. Mr Potato walks to his house, and goes to bed after work. He then starts having numerous night mares about bad things that happen to potatoes, ad is struggling sleeping. At the end you see that he works at the Walkers crisp factory.

"DINOSAURS IN SPACE"

Animation Planning-Outline of Idea

We wanted to make an odd animation.

To come up with the idea myself and Saffron looked at two things that were not directly associated, are initial inspiration was a YouTube channel called ‘ross Plaskow’ who makes a show called ‘Dinosaurs In Space’ our idea creatively is called ‘Potatoes in Space’.

The film will have two main characters, Mr potatoes and Mrs potatoes, who are madly in love but have a major problem. Mrs Potatoes snores so loud that Mr Potatoes cannot sleep, after many restless nights he has to come up with a way of stopping her.  But he knows that if he wakes her, he’ll become like her last boyfriend…Crisps.

The animation will be set in space and will combine after effects computer aided animation with real life stock images of the moon, and will be a mixture of live action and animation. 

There shouldn’t be to many technical limitations considering the way that we are animating, as this will be all on the computer.   

The closest comparison of what we would like to create would be ‘the amazing world of gumball’.

Animation Planning-Considering formats

The different formats that we could use are: plasticine, time lapse photography, animation through software, real objects or toys.

There's an appeal for using real objects and toys as you don't have to spend time creating the characters, such as using Lego (however it's unoriginal unless you can put a spin on it). But using plasticine enables us to see how traditional animation was made by making the characters physically move by molding them to.

Another idea could be using pictures of people and using stop motion carefully to make them move, by making them move slightly for each photo.

I am quite interested in learning to use software to make animation as it seems more realistic to the types of animation that are popular today, aside from the Wallace and Gromit styles of animation. I feel it would be more professional than plasticine, depending on how much time you spent making the characters and set. However, through software it still takes a lot of time to create the perfect character, and to move all the ligaments and facial expressions and syncing the voices to mouth movements.