This week has been spent mostly searching for a visual style for my film in character, environment and colour design. Below are a selection of pre-production pages that I've been working on this week to give you an idea of what's going on!
In the design of the mouse, I don't want him to be too cartoony as he needs to portray some serious emotions and that style simply would not fit. With that in mind, I'm keeping to fairly realistic anatomy and body proportions. He needs an expressive face to convey his emotions to the audience however, so facially he cannot be super-realistic. Instead, I'm going with very simple dot-like eyes and small eyebrows; they are easy to emote with and don't make the character too human or too cartoony.
Overall I had preferred the idea of brown fur for this little guy as it seemed warmer and more fit for a 'hero' character. Putting him into the context of the environment however, it's clear that he stands out much more if he has grey fur.
I have also been playing with colour schemes for the environment. I want to use colour to add to the emotions of each scene and with that in mind warmer, happier scenes will be red-yellow tinted whereas colder, more frightening scenes will be darkened to a blue.
Having decided on a colour scheme, that still left the background style. The previous images had a very sterile, digital feel to them and the above crayon-coloured thumbnails don't have the same weight of atmosphere. The painted-over-pencil thumbnails however seem to convey exactly what I want; the weight of atmosphere combined with the organic texture of pencils.
