Whilst I was being told the project brief I found it difficult to figure out what sort of pixelation technique I was going to use, because I didn’t really understand it, however I quickly thought of rotoscope as my choice of method, it being something I had never tried before and am interested in. I also quickly thought of a basic outline of the tone and the story I wanted to tell with the 45 second time frame. I used Adobe Audition to start making the soundscape of the animation. Most sounds where found online using copyright free sites or using sounds from the Adobe suite, because I could not replicate most of the sounds myself for what I wanted to do.

Whilst working on the soundscape I started working on character designs, I wanted to do a tough guy kind of character with a style inspired by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s ‘Batman The Long Halloween’ as it has a very rough style with simplistic but bold colouring, using the black shadows to its advantage. I also wanted to incorporate a graininess seen in 90’s anime like ‘Cowboy Bebop’. To help come up with character designs and overall art style I created a moodboard compiling all of my inspirations into one picture, this always is a great help for character design.

The first iteration of the character design was done on paper. It encapsulated the art style I wanted to use however I thought it looked too similar to the character ‘Billy Butcher’ from ‘The Boys’ so I wanted to change parts about him. When designing the character I quickly realised that it was going to be very difficult to animate him so I needed to have minimal shots of him moving too ambitiously. After the character design I moved onto storyboarding.