Rationale

My research revealed that Humpty Dumpty was a drink in which brandy was boiled with ale from the seventeenth century. It revealed that a Humpty Dumpty was a short and clumsy person, and that it may refer to king Richard the 3rd of England. I also learned what reduplicative meant (not in realtion to the animation but it was interesting to find out none-the-less).

My opinion on the popular interpretations of Humpty Dumpty have remained largely unchanged. By that I mean I don't really have an opinion. It was interesting to learn however that this rhyme used to be a riddle, but overtime the answer became so well known that this aspect of it has become lost.

I have interpreted this rhyme into the modern context by taking a message from our binge drinking culture and trying to portray the dangers of too much alcohol in a friendly humorous way. I have also used a 'modern' playground item - the one person duck seesaw.

I chose to show the story this way because A) I like to entertain people with whatever I make and B) people are generally more open to a humorous message (in my experience).

I chose to use the font 'THOR' for the great falls alcohol bottle, I used a bold 'Arial' font for the landmine sign, and I used 'Boom Tank' for the boom onomatopoeia. I looked at various beer bottle labels and based on what I saw from then I chose to use THOR because it fits with that style of banner. Arial is a clean font that is easy to read quickly. It is also used on many large outdoor signs for this very reason. "Boom Tank' had the shattery styling of an explosion so I capitalised it and bolded it, then animated it and I think the effect worked well.

I decided to give the animation a very light feel and use no music in it, just straight sound effects. I wanted to let the audience concentrate on what was happening on screen rather than listening to a possibly distracting extra layer of audio.

Final Animation

Here is the link to my final animation on Youtube: http://youtu.be/z7_Jiea1IKY - (watch in 1080p FTW)

Animation Style notes

I decided to keep an idea I had earlier on and make this mostly a side scroller of an animation.

In terms of character design, I still have not managed to find the name for the inspiration I had or an example of it, but it is where the face of a character is sideways and you can see both eyes and the mouth on that side of the face.

I think movies that mix reality and animation together have a nice feel to them so I am trying to recreate that feel with my project. This is just one example of someone elses work: http://vimeo.com/11984027 adding 2D to live action. I don't think mine will make it quite up to that standard, but that's the sort of thing I'm aiming at.

For the sound design I'm thinking of using plain sound effects, just keeping it free from music and allowing the audience to focus on the events of the animation.

Slight changes

There have been some slight changes, which I think are not all that worth storyboarding so I will just note them here.

As I was animating the story I had a number of ideas which I think made the story flow better such as:

- Starting with Humpty actually sitting on a wall

- He sees a great fall from the wall then drinks it

- rather than monkey bars which he ducks and knocks his head, have it be one of those single person seesaw things (then in addition to having the great fall (beer) he can have a great fall and fly off the seesaw out of clumsyness and with the effect of the beer taking place)

- cut out the skateboarding (that was a placeholder anyway)

- no ambulance - just a newspaper article stating that experimental horse medics failed (like an idea in my earlier brainstorm)

- have it culminate in a minefield testing facility beside a kids playground (because why not? it is an animation after all - things can get crazy)

There you have it. I suppose there are a few changes, but as I'm nearly through the animation now I don't think a modified storyboard is necessary.

Animatic

Here is the animatic for the last idea: http://youtu.be/a4gJ_jFQnpY

Character sketch

This is a sketch of the humpty dumpty character. I've styled him after the art style where they put all the features on the front of the body - flattening out a 3d object - though I really can't remember the name of this style.

The horse at top was a quick sketch from when my animation was to have horses in it.

Yet another story change

As I sat down to storyboard my last idea I thought it was too complicated for a 30 second clip, and would also require a great deal of asset creation and animation. So with thinking this I then proceeded to come up with a new idea.

This idea initially took inspiration from the fact that in the Oxford English Dictionary "humpty dumpty" refers to a drink of brandy that was boiled with ale in the seventeenth century.

I also made use of the fact that Humpty Dumpty was eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short, clumsy person.

So I mixed beer with clumsy person and came up with the idea that I could use this animation to show the bad effects of over drinking (in a humorous way of course).

With it being a small clumsy person who drinks the audience also won't mind that he will inevitably die :P (or at least that is my thinking anyway)

This can be seen in the storyboard below:

Slight change and style update

I have decided I want the animation to be strongly influenced by side-scrolling games. I'd like to be all in one camera shot as well.

Another Style Example

I have always like the style of Aardman's characters such as Wallace and Gromit and would like to design the characters to be somewhat like theirs.

Some more animation style precedents:
Pythagosaurus:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5cab4NMHsY

Monty Pythons Flying Circus animation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA973KVWyr4

Idea Narration

I settled on the idea of having Humpty Dumpty being a bad guy. This would mean that with his inevitabl;e demise the audience wouldn't feel bad that he couldn't be fixed.

I went with this from my second brainstorm.

Idea changed again

After going back to my story again, I didn't really like it as much as I thought so I went back to the brainstorming stage.

Here's the storm of brains:

The inspiration for this second brainstorm came when I read this online: 

"One [theory] advanced by Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930 and adopted by Robert Ripley, posits that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, depicted in Tudor histories, and particularly in Shakespeare's play, as humpbacked and [a king] who was defeated [in battle]."

Storyboard

Week 3 - Exercises

Here is what I did in class today documented in screenshots:

First of all I got a storyboard from google then cut it up into segments.

Then I animatic-ed it

Adding markers.

Deleted everything and made a shape layer.

Then I created a freeform scribble path for the shape to follow.

This screen shows all the editable parts of the path.

From here I'm playing with different ways to mask things (and also applying some styles near the end).

Another variation on the idea

Bungee Dumpty - OR - Humpty Bungee

Open on man sitting on a wall - swinging his legs - looking like he is unsure (figuratively sitting on a wall)

leans forwards and jumps/falls off

we see he is actually bungee jumping and enjoying it - as in it is a great fall - happy/excited music

2 horses in a field with riders look up at the sky (at him off falling offscreen)

back to him - rope tenses

man splits in half and lands on the ground in front of the horses - says "ouch"

the horses look at the body halves then at each other - one shrugs

(meanwhile maybe a pool of blood is getting bigger? - Don't know how far I want to take the gore :P )

horses look back at the body

End.