11 Second Club- Pony Problems

The next project is to create a short animation for the 11 second club which run monthly animation competitions with the whole idea focused on character performance and lip sync.
Although for the December competition it is just sound effects which I would consider to be easier than trying to match mouth shapes to speech.

For my idea, I decided on opting to reflect two very real characters that have enough personality to fill a dozen screens! Horses are also a big part in my life so portraying two characters from my stables means it's more personal to me and it will be easier for me to animate because I already know how they behave in reality.

Below are my initial sketches where I copied facial expressions from horse characters in animation, the two being the Captain from 101 Dalmatians and Maximus from Tangled. This was for me to understand how facial expressions are designed on animals so I could draw them for myself on my characters.

 

 

 

 

The picture above: I started placing facial expressions I had copied onto the characters I was designing, in this case my character is the little Shetland pony.

 

 

 

Once again I'm putting the expressions on the pony and designing the scene (this was before the December clip was released).

 

 

Once I knew the clip I then developed characters further and added the rider (originally it was just going to be two horses).

 

 

 

This is the basic layout. 'Charlie' is slightly off screen as the centre of attention needs to be with the little Shetland and because it's small, I have to make sure the pony takes up more scene space.

Originally only the stable door was supposed to fall down at the end but then I felt if I was going to make the door fall over, I could go that step further and make the entire wall fall, to exaggerate the rider's force from her foot when she kicked the door shut.

The animatic shows the basic idea below.

 

 

I still plan to develop the characters further and relate them more to the real horses I work with.

 

Actual horse personalities (so you can understand where I'm basing my designs):

 

 

Poppet: Not a Shetland but small and fat enough to look like one!! In the summer she likes us to chase her around the field instead of doing any work so her build and stubborn attitude is being transferred into my character.

 

Charlie: Lovely horse..........just a bit daft. We often think he walks around day-dreaming then spooks himself back into reality. His bottom lip is also the floppiest at the yard so he can pull off the most funniest of facial expressions. I'm taking his bottom lip and his day-dreaming into my character.