From Script to Screen - Production Art Research

As Suggested in the OGR I'm going to be looking into more stylized ways of animating. So my search begins firstly with UPA.

A very stylized form of animating. The characters don't look realistic and they are made up of simple shapes. What I like most is the fact you can read a character very easily by the shapes they are drawn with, and they are exaggerated in this way to accentuate their personalities. For example, you can tell the lawyer is physically harmless, but very smart and deceitful by how his body is made from very simple circles and triangles. The wake up of the background is very economic as well in terms of design. It would allow me to focus more on the narrative and characters. They use musical accompaniment in the place of diegetic sound which I like very much.   

Rhapsody in Blue is an interesting animation because of the way it is stylized. Once again the scenery is very simple, its generally made up of a line depicting the horizon of the New York skyline of the buildings. The colour scheme is made of Blues, unless there has been a decision to make particular characters Pink, i.e. women, or the red haired put-upon husband followed in the story. In regards to scenery, things like the gilded doorway of the hotel to indicate its wealthiness, and the red apples.

Facial features are minimalism and accentuated once again to give the characters more of a personality, the main characters have had much more thought that the extras but looking at them even so, they aren't generic and all still have personality based on their body language and shape.

In terms of sound, the animation is made to match the music, which makes it appear the characters are reacting to a piece of non-diegetic music in place of they own diegetic noises. Although we can't hear the world around the characters it allows us to know the exact emotion of what is going on.

GET WITH THE TIMES!

How to adapt this so far?

I need to consider a stylized world where the characters are made up of simple shapes, with minimal facial features, but still maintain the sense of purpose within them. It would be useful to have the characters mimicking the products they own and sell in their shape make up. I can use colour to reflect mood and emotion, and I can stylize the scenery to focus more on whats important in the narrative and to save myself some time.

To follow is some Ideation and influence into the design of my characters.