Assigned Client Project: 'Nottingham Loves...'

Three weeks into my final year. I will blog, I promise.

For the assigned client project, I will be working on an animation for the Young Creative Awards 2014. The brief asks what we think 'Nottingham Loves...' or what we love about Nottingham?  
  I'll be honest, I didn't have a clue what to do at first and thought I may be at a slight disadvantage coming from London - even if I have been living here for roughly 2 years now...
But after some mind-mapping, I managed to get this far...

...and after some more thinking, I decided by topic would be 'Events at Old Market Square'.
My first few concepts for this idea involved a lot of architectural modelling..which I don't want to do, to put it simply. I want to focus on character animation, so I've decided to base my animation in a white world. For the 'events', I've chosen 3 events: GameCity, the Christmas Market/Winter Wonderland and 'Nottingham Riviera'. Each event will be represented by an object (as per listed event): an arcade machine, the 'North Star' swing ride and a deck chair and parasol.
For the character, I've decided to use a lion to represent the lions outside the city council house in Market Square. Here are my initial character drawings and T-poses for my designed character:

My idea is that the character will interact with each object with some sort of..distraction between each object. I've drawn up a storyboard..but having spoken to my tutorial group last week and getting a few more ideas, I think I'm going to redraw this so that it doesn't look so...plain...

That's it so far...I'll end with a screenshot of my (headless) character model so far...

Character and Narrative

For this brief, I will be reinterpreting and recreating a scene from a Fry and Laurie sketch. I have chosen this scene, set in a jewellery store (starting from 2:42):

I think it would be really interesting to play around with the facial expressions of the characters in this scene, as the emotions of the characters keep changing - particularly Hugh as he goes from confused to frustrated and agitated.

I've made a storyboard with some key shots so that I am ready to start animating:

 

Admittedly, I've been a little lazy with my last few animations and just animated as I went along, so I'm hoping this will help me to plan out my animation better and allow me to animate a little faster, rather than getting stuck in the middle!

I'm also going to have a try at the character designing brief. In this brief, I will be looking to redesign 1 (instead of 3) character from Neil Gaiman's 'The Sandman' graphic novels.

I've been reading the comics to give me an idea of which character I would want to redesign, but I haven't decided which one yet.
I've decided to try and take on this brief as I won't have access to a computer over the next 3 weeks, so I'll keep myself busy with character designing and sketches instead!