Design research and early linetests

At some point of the production it turned out that I would need two narrative levels.

One part should be animated in a classical frame-by-frame style. In those parts the story would be told only by the warriors acting (except of the dormouse and the crows of course as I mentioned before).

In the other part a narrator had to tell the story. It should help me to submit the more complicated contexts of the plot. Only in here the figures of the fields appear. I decided to animate those parts in a cross-fading technique and fit it together in After Effects. This had the useful sideeffect of not needing to animate the fields frame by frame. That would have been very complex.

I was trying different materials and techniques. The sequences of the warrior should look like they were inked on paper. I chose a monochrome coloration design for that.
The cross-fading parts should be a little bit more colourful and I wanted to have some more depth in the pictures. So I decided to split the screen into different layers which I used like theater culisses and inserted some camera movements to further the plasticity of the scenes.

To manage a smooth transition from one narrative level into another, I had to come up with some special actions in which something or somebody covers the camera for a moment.


Designtest with ink and pencil, 2005

Designtest with marker and pencil, 2005