BPA 2D Contest part 2- Animation

This was a group project retelling a fairy tale into something new. Sadira, Bee, and I all worked together to make this project. We chose a fairy tale from the Grimm Brothers called ‘Frau Trude’, or ‘Mother Trudy’. It’s a story about a misbehaving girl that gets turned into a block of wood by a witch. This portfolio shows the process our team took to storyboard and animate the project.

Once all the character designs were made, it was time to make the story board. Sadira took on the task to make the storyboard, using the script I made.

“It starts with an establishing shot of the quaint village that the Girl lives in, then zooms in on the house where arguing can be heard. We get a shot inside the house as something flies at the wall right next to the Mother, and then pans to the Girl who threw it. We then get a reverse shot where we see the Father’s face as he listens to the Girl and Mother fighting. He finally gets up and tells her that she needs to stop. The Girl says something nasty back and promptly gets kicked out. She wanders through the village as people jump out of her way in fear. She wanders so far she gets lost in the woods, until she sees the light from a small log cabin. She goes inside and meets Frau Trude, who talks to her and teaches her a spell that turns food into frogs. She tells the Girl to use it on her parents whenever they give her trouble. The Girl wanders back home and tells her parents about Frau Trude, and they are so horrified that they lock her in her room without dinner. The Girl sneaks out and runs back to Frau Trude’s house, where she sees a delicious pie in the windowsill. As she tries to reach for it, she sees a devil with a head of fire in the kitchen and runs inside scared. Frau Trude greets her, and when the Girl tells her what she saw, Frau Trude laughs and tries to turn her into a block of wood. But the Girl dodges out of the way, and the spell hits a mirror and turns Frau Trude into a block of wood instead. The Girl picks up the block of wood and tosses it into the fire, and uses the light to read Frau Trudes spellbook. Some sort of time skip should show the Girl steadily becoming a witch like Frau Trude.”

–frau trude fairytale script

Using Sadira’s storyboard, I spliced the frames together to layout the pacing of the animation. This would be what we would base the sketch and subsequent final products on. The quality is so low because I put it together by screenshotting each individual frame and importing them into a video editor.

In order to make the animation have a uniform style, I created a style guide I would use as a reference when animating. The style was based off of the design of Frau Trude, and then translated onto the other character designs as I received them from the team. It was a challenge to animate in a style so dissimilar to mine, and it’s easy to tell in the final animations where I slipped up, because this style was so new and different to me.

And with Sadira’s storyboard and the style guide as a reference, I began to sketch out the animation in the official style. I then immediately realized how big of a task that was, and asked for help from the other team members. These videos are the sketches that were provided.

After everyone got the sketches done, I began on the line art. There were a few spots that hadn’t gotten sketched out yet, but overall, the help from my team mates made the entire process much easier. There were only a few issues with the animation, like versions of the file not syncing when I animated on a laptop at home versus the drawing tablet at school; I had to re-animate several parts, but I still got it done in the end, and ready for my other team mates to color and add backgrounds to.

In the end, we managed to finish the animation before the deadline, but just barely. Unfortunatly, syncing issues between files meant that the final file we submitted was lacking in some color, despite my best efforts to combine the files properly. The finished animation on top and this animation here are both finished in different ways, but this is the version that was submitted to the BPA contest.