Art Design for backgrounds

For the art work of the video I offered to do the designs and final production as I am more experienced in drawing.

For the background I tried to create one scene on A3 paper to make it easier to film.  To make it more relevant to the artist I chose a park scene (which was decided in the group), which is more personal and can relate to an audience then a more unrealistic location.  Here is the first draft done in permanent marker pen on strong white card.

The lines are linear (as the design should be kept simple), much inspiration has been taken from the Juno opening credits,  as I thought the mix of stop animation was effective with the drawing style. In this first draft we did the test footage and I thought there could be more detail and added elements to it such as a sign post, a bin and fallen leaves.

My next draft had all of these elements in and was drawn with more precision, so it would be more in focus. I also changed some of the trees to make them stand out more. I liked it, and thought it was a good black and white drawing, however as the photo graphs  are also in black and white I wanted there to be more colour, or at least let my group have the option of the two (as we needed to start filming strait away). Here is the colour background.

This is the one that was decided on in the end as it made the shot look livelier. I only partially coloured the background as I did want the strong colour to be over barring and draw attention away from the animation.

For the instrumental break (towards the end of the song) I drew the park scene in stop animation on black card using white charcoal pencil. It is supposed to represent that the day dream has ended and it is night.

The materials I used for the backgrounds were very important in achieving the effects. The black permanent marker made the lines in focus and gave more definition in the linear style. The coloured permanent markers stood out enough unlike the effect of using colouring pencils which tends to look faded and less professional. For the night scene when I re-drew the background the white charcoal pencil is one of the material which would show up properly on istop, although it tend to smudge which is the only downside.