On February 6th, we took a visit to the Museum of Brands for the briefing on our new university-led DPS project. The people there seemed happy to have us, as they were not used to collaborating with people in animation (their words), and described the brief after a short history lesson on the museum (which was admittedly much older than I’d expected).

We were tasked to create a short animation (5 to 10 seconds) revolving around a specific festivity or holiday of our choosing, from Christmas and Halloween to Earth Day and other, more contemporary events. The catch was that we had to base our animation on the museum’s front entrance, which had some cool art depicting various products in a limited colour palette. As long as the animation started and ended with the entrance’s picture they provided us, we had complete freedom over how we used it.

Once finished, they would use our animations to celebrate the festivities on their social medias accounts, by posting them throughout the year. This was obviously extremely catching, as that would get a lot of eyes on our art, which is exactly what we need as up-and-coming animators.

I chose to go with Halloween as my festivity, since I’d had a pretty interesting idea as the brief was still being explained. I thought of turning the mural into a lineless background, switching its red-blue-yellow colour scheme for an orange-purple-green one (colours more attributed to Halloween and generally spooky things). The biggest visual inspiration for this decision were the Disney XD idents made by Golden Wolf since the mid-2010s. Their visual identity really stuck with me, and I wanted to try my hand at something similar.

Since doing children trick-or-treating seemed a bit bland, I decided to go with ghosts, which lend themselves to more interesting movements while still fitting the spooky vibes of the season. My general idea involved them flying into frame, eating some of the food items on the mural, and exiting the frame before the end of the shot.

I made this piece of concept art to showcase my general idea for the visual style: a bright and limited colour palette, partially lineless art, and ghosts with simple designs that can lend themselves to very smooth animation. Since we have a pretty long time to work on this, and the ghosts will be some of the only moving parts in the animation, I want them to be extremely well-animated.

I made some very rough thumbnails to figure out the movement. Essentially, the transition from the photo to the stylized lineless look would happen from one of the circle windows on the door: from there, the ghosts would fly in from the sides, eat their food, place it back and fly into the window again, followed by everything else, thus returning to the original photo.

Having one ghost on each side should work well, as it’ll give either side of the wall an interesting animation to show. This way, if the video gets cropped for social media usage (Instagram’s 1:1 image ratio, for example), there will be something to see regardless of how it’s cut.

From now, I’ll have to focus on making a clean version of the background (which I’ve started working on), as well as properly timing out the animation, in order to begin clean boarding and keyframing. It will easily fit within 10 seconds, so I’m not too worried about that.

Overall, I’m confident about my idea, and as long as I pace myself well (as I did with the Blink Industries project), I think I’ll deliver a good project I’ll be proud to show off in my portfolio.