Early Insights Into My Next Animation

Hi everyone~ 🧡

I wanted to give you a few WIP insights into my next project! These are all early previews of the initial scenes the next project. The focus on this one is growth and size difference interaction. These previews are still rough and entirely missing facial animation, but I felt it was maybe interesting for some of you to see the early stages as well! ^^

If you scroll back in my timeline a bit you'll see a rough animatic of my project. I've been trying to storyboard my animations before, but it's a process that I've never really been that comfortable with using. For this animation I'm trying to force it into my process a bit more by overlaying the storyboard on my camera and animating to fit the storyboard. Like this:

This is close to the start of my project. We'll see Chance and Jay run out of a club and embrace in a back alley - music playing in the background. I have some lore in mind for Chance, I want him to be a DJ and this is slightly leaning into that premise, if you squint you might have seen the mixer in the previous animation 😅

But it's inevitable that I'll want to divert from the storyboard and frame up parts of my shots in a new way. I'm not a 2D artist at all, so I often struggle so much with my drawn frames that I can't really get a clean idea of what I want before I see it in 3D. Here's one shot that changed a lot, the first growth spurt.

Aside from this main shot of the spurt, I think I'll have a cutaway to his clothes tightening on his body~ Yes, fully clothed characters is my plan xD

I have to say, of all the animating I've done so far, getting two muzzles to lock in a kiss has to be the hardest thing I've ever attempted >.< Here's an early view of my kissing scene:

I don't have expressions set up in this one yet, and I'll make them less jittery. Then I'll add in a bit of "hunger" and excitement by maybe having Chance pull in Jay for a kiss by his clothes. That's a shot I'm both excited and scared to do 😅

But after the first growth spurt, we'll kick things into a higher gear by having Chance take charge! The small rabbit is not so small anymore and he throws his weight around, pinning Jay to a wall:

We're going to follow that up by another growth spurt up against that crumbling brick... 👀💦 At least that's what I have in mind.

Ultimately I want Chance to take up most of that alley but we'll see how far I can go with him! I'll have more previews of some later scenes, and hopefully some FX shots too, next time! 🧡