Tuesday 4 June 2013

Style Design



When thinking of the style for The Robin I firstly thought of how the script was written. The story was simple and heartwarming. The style therefore needed to reflect that. Warm, friendly and over all, simple. For me this conjured up round edges, no sharp lines, warm colours, to keep it friendly. Something reminiscent of childhood.

The story is set in the morning, this allowed for a rich colour scheme. Making the sky orange created an instant warm and friendly outlook. By having the sun rise slowly over the course of the story meant that we could include long shadows adding to the depth and overall colour scheme. Going back to the simplicity of the film I tried to limit the palette both in saturation and amount of colours. Sticking to greens, oranges, yellows and browns really helped to set the tone for the film. I have always been a fan of loosing a lot of the saturation in the backgrounds and adding it in the characters. I feel that it makes the animation pop and your focus is more on the action rather than the aesthetics of the world.



When it came to creating the props and backdrops of each shot it was time to look around for inspiration. We had our colour scheme but now to find a method of creating this world. I have to credit one video from a Swedish animation and illustration house called BRIKK named PAR – Think big. I had favourited the video on Vimeo weeks before and it struck me as being something that would be perfect for The Robin. Obviously not copying it, I took bits from it that I liked. I had always enjoyed using the dry brushes you get in Photoshop and loved the way they were used in BRIKK's video. Also the thick black lines would also really help to distinguish the elements like the bird table from the large expanse of the garden. By incorporating these techniques, using the dry brush in the background and solid colour with black line in the foreground, the style was coming to together. Now how would the characters look within this world?