Premise; Orthographs, Environment art, Written Storyboard and Animatic

Orthographs

(Colour, Clothes)

(Colour, Bare [for modeling])

(Sketch, Clothes)

(Sketch, Clothes Only)

Character Concept Art (old, for reference)

I'm pretty happy with my characters solidified design, and with the right shaders/materials I think they could look really styilied. I'm intending to use 2D animation to animate the characters big white eyes, which is something I experemented with in Year 1, and really liked the look of.

Modeling this character might take a fair amount of judgment due to their cartoony style and ambiguous geometry. Especially the cloak will be interesting to model, rig and skin since it appears as such a simple shape in drawings, but will likely have to be a lot more complicated in 3D to fit around the model.

Environment Concept Art

(Forest at day under the black Sun)

I'm still not 100% solidified on how the trees of the enchanted forest will look. I will likely go for a low poly jaged style, but I was thinking of adding some 2D elements such as outlines. This is something I'll have to experiment with in Maya.

(Forest at night lit by a campfire)

The nice thing about using low poly trees is that the edges which get isolated as the ones around them disappear might create some cool creepy patterns which shift as the light moves around. I've tried to capture this effect here.

(The floating window)

In the revised version of my story, the character is saved by a mysterious window that appears and projects its light onto the ground, before a door also opens out of the void, projecting a light-path towards a small woodland cabin. The interior is not visible from the outside, but since the interior of the cabin is illuminated, it exists from the inside, like a cozy little room floating alone in the void.

Written Storyboard/Shot layout

A description of the shots that will make up the short

Thumbnail Animatic

A basic animatic which helps set the tone of my short and establish timings (this will likely be subject to change). Its really difficult to show what's going on with the environment in animatic form without properly 2D animating, since the environment shifts and changes as the character moves around. I decided to at least try and establish the tone and framing  of each shot, even if the animation is limited. The shots correspond to the shot layout guide above.

Also, here is a re-cap of the story, written in full;