Layout colour scheme test

I've roughly drawn and colour one of the scenes from my animatic and then simple toggled around with the hue and saturation, which changed the mood and the time of day in the scene:

Original daytime:

Moody daytime:

Dusk:

Moody dusk:

Mask colour schemes

Here I have had a look into the colour of the masks of the characters. These are very important as they will most likely be the most colourful part on the character:

Big guy masks:

Small guy masks:

Small character mask design

For the small guys mask I went for something less intimidating. I looked at these more rounded African tribal masks for inspiration:

http://www.genuineafrica.com/baluba_mask_13.htm

http://masks.novica.com/

Following the more circular shape and slotted eyes I progressed on to design the mask for the small character, here was my development:

Here are 2 rough sketches of the characters with there final masks:

Big character mask design

Here is my final design for the big guys mask. It's slightly egg-shaped, has a menacing look about and has large eye holes so we can see the expression in his eyes. That last part is important as we see his brow furrow at one point in the animatic:

Mask Design

To design the masks for the characters I needed to do a little research into tribal masks to get a bit of inspiration:

http://tribalafricanmask.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/vintage-wooden-ethnic-evil-monster-mask.html

http://www.novica.com/itemdetail/?pid=69308

I started working on the big guy's mask first:

More figure experimenting

Baring in mind none of these shots are in the animatic this is almost like concept art as really its just giving me ideas for what the characters will look like and what their size should be relative to each other:

Animatic with camera movement

I put the animatic into After Effects and added a camera to try out some camera motion that hasn't already be shown in the animatic, but could be applied:

Figure experimenting

Animatic Final

Here is the finished animatic, now I can work on the visual aspect of my animation including character designs, colour scripts, layout design etc:

Animatic Third Draft

In this draft I've added more action to keep the adrenaline up. Unlike my first storyboard my animatic seemed a little to slow:

Animatic Second Draft

In this draft I added more keyframes to show how the movement would work in the final animation and a couple of other details like motion lines when the character is running to show even though the camera identically follows him there is movement in the background:

Animatic First Draft

I made this animatic in flash and I added one little bit in the middle of this that is different to the storyboard because when I timed it out there was a little room for more. Its a shot of the enemy getting an angry face as he misses the character: