In my 2D and Traditional Animation class, we've started a big collaborative project. Not only is the whole class participating, but another class is being brought in as well. Pre-production has started and we've all been split up into small groups to work on specific sections. The overall setting has been established and parts have been assigned.
The other class that we're working with is a biology class, which the the overall theme pf the project. We are making them a short to explain the structure of cells, as well as the function of the organelles--a term I miraculously remember from my 7th grade science class. The way we're going to do this short is through an analogy. We're going to create a town, maybe two, to represent the cell and each part of the cell is going to have it's own personal analogy. My team--me, one other animator, and three biology students--have the smooth and rough endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and ribosomes. We're going to turn the ER into a two part factory and the ribosomes into factory workers. The bio students explained to us how the ER and ribosomes work as well as a bit about the other organelles they interact with so the two of us could start designing things.
Currently my animation teammate, May, and I are going to be doing stop motion for our section of the short. I suggested a cross between cut-out stop motion and claymation to combine her interest in working with clay, as well as the equipment provided to us which is suited to a top down view. Neither of us have worked with stop motion before but I wanted to try it so we'll have to watch tutorials and ask a lot of questions, as well as do a fair bit of experimentation. I'm excited though, since stop motion is something I'm very interested in.
The way May and I have split up the designs process is that I am figuring out the look of the ER factory, while she is figuring out how the characters look. On Wednesday we found out that there is a base character design, so she's primarily going to be figuring out how to merge that design while still referencing how ribosomes look.
For the factory I started with looking up images of the ER as well as simple, cartoony factory designs. The wavy shape of the ER reminded me of an architectural style that my father deeply enjoys, so I asked him about his favorite architect. This lead me to Antoni Gaudí's work, specifically "Casa Mila". I used both Gaudí's work and the depictions of the ER primarily to create the factory's look. The rough ER keeps it's wavy, layered look. I used the smooth ER as burn off pipes, despite them also being a part of the production side of the factory. The rough ER is typically shown to have the ribosomes attached to the outside of it, so I placed them to look like windows so the factory still looks similar to the ER diagram. The color palette I chose is going to have to change, because the whole short is going to have a sort of pink tint over it, as well as because of what plasticine clay colors we will actually have available to us.
There's only four weeks to do everything so over the next week May and I will be storyboarding our part of the short, as well as learning how to do stop motion, and making all the sets and characters that we need.
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