Apr 14, 2021

5 min read

Animal Part 3

4/1

Thinking about a storyboard, I thought of a few possible stories that could convey a beginning, middle, and end. I wanted to implement the endangered reason in my story as well which was either deforestation or hunters. I also needed to focus on the bear’s qualities and movement. Moon bears are known for being good climbers, so I thought I could incorporate that into my story as well. The original storyboard that I thought of was an opening of branches and leaves with the title, and the bear opens up the leaves to see hunters camping. The bear then walks and climbs up the tree to see a forrest with tree stumps. I started working on some rough illustrations.

4/5

I decided to change the beginning of the story by not including the hunters. I also thought the leaves opening would be unrealistic if the bear poked his head in. I changed the beginning to have the title on the moon since the animal is called Moon Bear. It then panels down the trees to show the bear walking.

I also started creating the illustrations of the bear walking. I plan to create 8 in total, so that the movement wouldn’t be so static. The puppet tool wasn’t quite working since the bear’s legs have a lot of different joints, so I decided to make it on Illustrator instead. I watched over video clips of the bear walking to study how the four legs work together.

4/8

I decided to finish all of the illustrations, so that I could focus on AfterEffects now. I noticed that the bear walking had a pattern, so I repeated each step in AfterEffects. A bear climbing is very simple because it simply uses its left side of the body and then the right side of the body.

4/13

For the sounds, I made the walking noises with an aluminum plastic bag, so that it could make the sounds of leaves crunching. I did this by softly pressing it with my hands. I was looking at videos of bears climbing, and the bark of the trees made a very distinct sound similarly to when I stroke the bristles of a brush. For the night sound, I went to my local park and made sure to capture cricket sounds. For the construction sound, since it is a in distance, the sound needed to be quiet, so I recorded a truck backing up.

I also added movement to the tractor by dividing the tractor into different parts, so that I could rotate each part accordingly.

I also used the puppet tool to create some natural movements with the tree and the bear’s movement that I was unable to make on Illustrator.

4/15

After getting feedback, I added some zooming in panels in the beginning and the end. I also simplified stuff that were in the distance. I also changed one of my colors since the shades of green were too different. I removed the trees in the background, simplified the tractor and tree, and removed a color as well as shrink the tree stumps that were further in the back. The green is also less contrasted with the darker shade of green.