Animation Brief

For the animation module is was initially drawn to the Marvel brief, as I felt it offered a lot of interesting possibilities. I was slightly unsure of the limitations of having to use their pre-existing elements for the animation, but I had an idea pretty much straight away so I decided to go with it. My initial idea was to be aimed at a younger age group, using characters present in recent successful film adaptations of Marvel comics, namely X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spiderman, The Hulk and Ironman. My idea was influenced by the intro to the original X-men animated cartoon.

It was to involve key major characters bursting from the paper pages of comic books, e.g. Wolverine slashing out of the page, Spiderman swinging through the page, and to then have them all racing towards a point from different directions, converging at the same time as in the end to the X-men cartoon intro. Here's said intro, just because its a great start to a classic cartoon.




Though I really liked this idea, and spent a lot of time searching for suitable images from various archived sources of Marvel comics, I decided not to use the idea, as I felt it wasn't going to turn out as I wanted due to the difficulties of finding and modifying the images I'd need. So after going back to the drawing board and kicking around a few ideas, I settled on something completely different. The idea I decided to use involves a very minimal use of character, with the identity of the character (Dr. Doom) only being made absolutely clear at the end. This idea is aimed more at a slightly older audience, people who have been collectors of comics for years, who either have vast collections of old comics and like to keep them in immaculate condition and are reluctant to read them and/or have missed certain issues of their favourite comics at some point in the past. The idea is to show how the vast back catalogue of comics produced by marvel is now easily available in one place online.

Style-wise I'd had the idea of everything being very greyscale until the end when the shot moves out to reveal the computer screen, at which point it would transition to colour. I was interested in having the look of old, uncoloured comic books for the first section as its supposed to represent the old way of doing things. I toyed with the idea of having everything purely black and white with single touches of colour in a Sin City style, but in the end I decided to stick mainly within shades of grey and use colour for a few important elements, such as Doom himself and the Marvel logo. Here's the animatic for my animation:

I've just noticed the sound is out of sync on here, it runs fine on the original QT movie i made, so I can only assume its something to do with bloggers video hosting.