NC: Narrative: Oliver Ideas

I will update with a proper scanned image when I get a scanner as I wanted to upload this to show my progress in creating Oliver.

NC: Narrative: Thumbnails - Environment.

NC: Narrative: Child Acts in the circus influence map.

NC: Influence Map - Father Character

I have made this influence map as it shows gives a rough idea of what the Father will be like. I have looked at films, in particular, where the Father is very commanding and doesn't show much respect for their child/children. As the Father wants his son to be what he wants to be, he needs to be aggressive and "pushy", and this should obviously be shown in his appearance.

NC: Timetable - First OGR Preperation.

As OGR is fast approaching we've used the time today before our Character sessions to make a checklist and a timetable preparing us for next weeks OGR.

NC: Narrative - Silhouettes of Oliver.

I have begun transfer some silhouettes I was outlining in my sketchbook into sketchbook pro of our protagonist Oliver. The first and the last are his child designs. The middle set I was experimenting with designs of how he would look, whether the love of well prepared food would mean he would be full around the middle or well maintained as he would be living with a circus and would need to train. I will be discussing some designs aspects with my group after Alan's tutorial tomorrow.  

Narrative Script

A rewrite of our original script. I have tried to take into account some of the things Alan spoke to us about in our tutorial last week.

There may be some things that I need to rewrite but for now this will the base for the storyboard. 

Year 2. Narrative Script.

NC: Narrative Character Summaries.

After the tutorial with Alan, I was tasked with giving a summary to our characters to better understand them. I have drafted a statement for each.

Oliver Caro.

Oliver is our protagonist for this animation. He starts of showing himself as a child speaking with his father. He is thin, brown-haired and blue eyed. He has skills with the knife even at his age which in the first instance would be around 10 years old. His only goals are to impress his father and make sure he doesn't screw up. But he always seems to make a mistake somewhere along the line. Always around food too. 

Frederick Caro.

Frederick is father to Oliver, is a typical run of the mill father who wants only the best, love and respect of his son. He has the same brown hair  but green eyes. After the death of his wife, Frederick had to raise Oliver by himself through the circus life. His wife's death devestated him and he has not been the ver happy type since. With Oliver's growth he gets more and more concerned that his son is not as passionate about his job like he is or rather was. 

These are just a little outline of the characters and in draft form as something to work with when beginning our designing stage. 

NC: Influence Map - Main Character

This is a quick influence map that demonstrates how the main character will act. As the main character is not fully suited to his role as a knife thrower, he is quite clumsy and not too sure about what he is doing. Following on from Alan's suggestion of looking at Jim Dales' character form "Carry On Cowboy", I have looked at similar characters across films and cartoons. Characters like Inspector Gadget and Inspector Closeau, From "The Pink Panther Show", are very careless and get themselves into a lot of tricky situations. Such characteristics can be portrayed in our knife thrower character as he lacks the ability to be perfect at his job, and that is clearly not what his job should be.

NC: Narrative Rough Script for tutorial

Here is a rough script that we comprised to give us a rough idea on how our animation would play out. 

Knife Thrower

NC: Narrative : Refection Research

Chief

NC: Narrative group: Story Ideas

After our tutorial meet with Alan, we sat down as a group and talked about getting our story away from the concept of fate to die. Fate in itself is a complex word and can be easily associated with Destiny and death. As asked we looked more deeply into the word fate and try not to go too in the typical direction. 

Our first idea, which branched from this Death concept, we first thought what could happen was that we would have had the character have continuous encounters with Death and the character would intervene or miss the opportunity, eventually leading to his final fate in dying. After the tutorial, we have been pushed as far away from death as a concept as possible. 

Our second idea arrived when we were talking about what kind of animation we would make. We were thinking about the ''circus'' and that that is a broad subject to animate from. We brought ideas of typical circus theatrics, for example puppetry, bringing this to concept of a child. This child would be told that he was going to be something, part of the circus, when he doesn't want to do this he goes away and tries different things - like dentistry, doctoring, etc - until one day he returns to the circus and ends up going into the circus life. This sparked a flow of ideas. 

Our third idea was that the character starts as a child, his father would tell him that he would be part of the circus, as specific act, like him and his father before him. But the child wanted to follow his own path and did not go down his father's path. We played an example out with the Father being a Trapeze artist and the child beginning to work with the knife throwers. As he grows up his Father tries to get the child to go into Trapeze and eventually the child(now adult) has to take to replacing his Father as he undergoes a accident or becomes too old to perform. Meeting his Fate by performing and realising this event was what he should do. 

We spoke again and we have begun piecing together this idea and how we would convey the concept of Fate to the audience as well as not giving to much away. So far we have the A - B points we just need to work out the middle.