Jayce Rodrigues

Illustration of four characters: one is a jock-o-lantern, a witch, a scarecrow, and a siren theme design.

Animation is a venture many perceive as something that only experienced artists can get into, and something that gets viewed without much thought without the process. However,  I will be taking you through the journey through the animation process and how it is created. This is just going to cover the very beginning and what happens before animating even happens.

This project is called “This Is Halloween” and is going to be a Halloween-themed animatic. An animatic, to put it in a  simple definition, moves less than an animation, but it’s more detailed than a storyboard. It takes less time, and if you want to make it a full animation, then the basis is set for you for the future. 

Character designs are first things first, and are used to figure out the character’s details before figuring out the rest. Since this is a Halloween-themed animatic, the plan was to shift previous character designs to represent Halloween themes and monsters.  This was a group of characters I already had ideas for since that would be the easiest to get out of the way.

With their designs to create a bit of unity between them all to signify that they come in a group, pumpkin motifs were added sporadically to their designs, and the green design was entirely pumpkin-based. The characters’ personalities were gonna be put into consideration and the Siren was chosen since it related to them the most. I decided to go with something not based on a sea-based siren because by making them the original bird-based ones. 

Next was background design, scene planning, and prop design. This was a bit more difficult, because I don’t draw backgrounds a lot, and these scenes in a way needed to make some sort of sense together. While colors weren’t the problem, it was mainly trying to design a layout. However, in my head I had a good general idea of what I was going for, so I took what I could see from my mind and put it onto paper. 

When doing scene planning, it was fairly simple, as I had already imagined what some scenes would look like quite vividly, but I not only had to make sure I remembered, but that I also made new scene sketches as well. 

This canvas is a messy display of my thoughts and what I needed to add. I needed to first pull out the lyrics so I can put names down of who I was thinking. The next nightmare was background design, I didn’t put in a lot of them, but in general areas that I deemed fit, such as a cornfield and general scary forest clearings.

Overall, this process was a learning experience, and now the only thing left to do is actually getting to animating. Now that the basic planning was complete,  it’s time for more designs and to begin.