Horror opening - animation

For our next task of animation we have to create a horror opening sequence for a film. In a task we had already done before we  hadlooked at old horror films and their openings. In our group we had all looked at a different films but in the end we chose to base the opening on the plauge of the zombies. We then started to think about what characters would fit wih this film and how we could animate them. We all did our own moodboard of ideas and then chose a character we would work on in final detial. Some of these were characters I made up and some I took from the film. I then picked a character from the film re-creating him to make him look more like an animated zombie and changing the colours of him. I drew him front on and got an idea of how he will look and how he might move. For him to move I needed to draw him from a side view, back view and from the front again. This was hard to know how a character would look from the side and how to draw it. I then did a colour version of him to bring the idea of the character to life and give a more detialed and intresting character. This image shows what my character will look like from the front, back and side.

Once I had drawn out all the ways my character would be seen I then decided I wanted my chatacter to walk as this is how I thought a zombie might move. I was given a silhouette of a character walking and I put this into photoshop and drew over it with my character. Then using the animation feature in phtotoshop I could see how he could move once I had drawn out all the frames for my character. For this I had to change the time between the frames so it would run smoothly. Once I had all my frames in black and white I created a new document and added colour to the frames and made him have more detial. This image is the frames in black and white as you can see I made my character more of a cartoon as I didn't want my character to look exactly the same as the character from the film.

 

 Once I had the frames for black and white and colour I created a document for my character to move across the page. I repeated the character loop twice so he would move across the page. To do this I had to make sure each frame was in the right place in reaction from the last frame and the next frame to come. Then again I made sure the character moved across the page smoothly changing the time between each frame to 0.2 seconds.

Now I had my character and he was animated I needed to think about the background he would walk on. To start with I designed a strip of what my background would look like, now I had an idea I wanted it to look like I then had to think about each layer of the background. This is to give it a 3D depth and not make the backgorund flat. In photoshop for my first layer I drew my moon in the middle of the strip of the background. This is my first layer because this is what would be seen furthest away in the background. My next layer I got an image from the internet which I copied to create a creepy fence however I left a gap in the middle for my gate to be on a different layer and closer to my character when he walk on the background. The thrid layer were my trees, for this I drew one and then copied the layer and made all the trees different sizes to create more depth. The next layer is the gate and a few grave stones to make it more of a horror background. For all of the layers I have added colour all of which are dark and gloomy to make sure it come across as a horror scene. Then my final layer is the ground which my chacter will walk across.