What is Conceptual Design
When thinking about conceptual design in transition planning, Gosia Kucharska (What is Concept Art, 2022) summarisies in his blog post with “Concept art lays the foundations of your animation design by producing an idea that aims to capture the visual feel of the project, and serves as a point of reference for illustrators and animators throughout the entire creative process.”
With this in mind, the focus of this blog post will be on the subject of story boarding to capture the main point of reference of the main slides in the animation.
The example above of a story board demonstrates the raw form of the animation, it plans the sequence of events in a form that can be easily changed and adjusted by the artists before creating the final sequence. The art work is inforative but basic, using only graphite and no colour, which allows the animator to focus soley on the subject, movement and content.
The video above displays the finished product animation, with key scenes recognisable from the initial story board sketches. This is an example of how storyboarding is essential in the initial stages of developing ideas for conceptual designs and transitions.
Animated Sequence Story Boarding
The story boarding above demonstrates the initial ideas for the key frames of the sustainablilty animation. These initial keyframes tell the story of the journey of a tree seeds journey through an urban landscape, it travels through the wind, lands in a crack and takes root, time passes as the tree grows and transforms the landscape into a lush and diverse habitat. The keyframes show the initial ideas which will under go the next process in development by digitally animating the frames. The process of tweening will fill in the gaps in between the key frames to create a smooth and seamless transition of frames.
A conceptual design idea to embed into the keyframes will be in the form of the seed becoming and eye of a occupant of the grey concrete environment. the seed will transition into the eye, which will blink and shed a tear, this tear will fall off their face and into the crack in the concrete where the seed landed. This tear will initiate the growth of the tree. This idea is an after thought from the initial story board and shows how essential it is to have key frames as a development starting point from which ideas can be developed and expanded from.
References
Home : Available online: https://studiopigeon.com/blog/what-is-concept-art/ [Accessed 22 Feb. 2023]
Book: The Wrong Trousers: Storyboard Collection, Nick Park, 1998. [Accessed 24 Feb 2023]
Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers (Train Chase Scene) Nick Park 1993 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrmZIgVoQw4 [Accessed 24 Feb 2023]