Key Scenes

There are many key scenes that can help to explain the geography of the animation in my storyboard:

1) The outside of the house - Shows the entire outside of the house and its surrounding scenery

2) The window view - Manages to capture most of the room's interactive area, basically the desk and all the makeup for the costume on top

3) The ground view - Looks up towards the house and gets a close up of the houses exterior

4) The road by the school - Shows the road, the car, the sign and the surrounding scenery for the school

5) In front of the school - Shows a front view of the school and the entering point for the character

6) The school interior - Viewing from the same angle as (5) but inside the school

7) The poster - Has a crucial part to the animation...the poster that states the halloween party is next week

Scenes

The scenes included in my story board are:

- The Bedroom
- Outside the House
- Outside the School
- Inside the School

Each of these scenes are divided into a couples of different shots with different camera angles, but as far as a birds eye view goes, this is how they work:

To explain these rough diagrams, this is what they represent:

Face Expressions

As much as the creature is the main character, the girl is the one who pulls a larger array of face expressions. Here are plenty of tests:

Posing

I decided to create a couple of poses for the creature character as technically she is the main character. The girl character is only seen from the front view at the beginning and end of the animation:

Turning and facing

Here are just a couple of little tests of face expressions, and I tried out turning the girl character 90 degrees, although the hair doesn't seem to be working:

The next steps...

Now I have the two main characters shaded and coloured on the front view. The next step would to be to create a turn-around for each of them and a couple of rough animations and poses of them doing things mentioned in the storyboard:

Shading

I've decided to keep the colour scheme for the creature black and white, its more dark and spooky that way. There are two versions of it, one more blank and basic while the other one has more details added in:

Creature front view

After getting the figure shape right, it was time to turn the character around to the front view:

Limb changing...

It seemed the proportions of this character weren't physically possible. The creature wouldn't be able to support its large head let alone the fact it made it look less intimidating. On top of that arms needed to be longer and the legs were looking a little too alien. These all needed to change:

Alter ego

The creature below is the terrifying imaginary alter ego of the character. The character is a imaginative young girl who, like most children, believe themselves to be more frightening than they appear to be on Halloween. I am demonstrating this at an exaggerated scale by highlighting how she perceives herself. The once innocent girl going out for Halloween is now, in her eyes, a horrifying interpretation of Dracula.

Looking at the sketches below, the girl's figure can not work for the creature as the head is too large and causes it to seem less threatening:

"...man I look coo-lourful?..."

I decided to colour in and shade the 2 versions of the character. Her fringe is missing in both forms because my storyboards is set so she has already cut the fringe before my animation starts. The reason I haven't given her any more details such as a shirt or black shoes is because I would like to simply stick to the poem and give the costume a simplistic/childish and perhaps rushed impression.

"...I'm dressed up like Dracula..."

I needed to create a front view of the character so I can then later create a full turn around, I did two versions, one in fancy dress and one with normal clothes:

Freckles!

I needed more features to make this character seems younger. I changed the expression to a smug grin and added freckles to the character because I thought it gave her a more youthful look. I also added the vampire clothes on the last frame:

More Character Development

I looked back at my initial idea, and started to create a body for this head in a jacket. In my first try the head was too round and the body was a bit oddly shaped. In the second try I corrected this but made the body too thin and the character too tall. For her age this physique didn't really fit. For the final try I kept the same head to squash her down a bit to give her a 'cute' impression, whilst I decreasing the brush size: