Dumbo!

The final elephant I looked at, sort of, was the lovable Dumbo by Disney. Not that I'm going for a Disneyesque look, but as I abandoned the beady eyes I thought I should find a reference closer to what I decided to do for my final character design and who better than Dumbo. Though Dumbo's a bit too stumpy for my liking, but the colours are mostly flat in Dumbo as well, which is what I'm aiming for.

Other sources of inspiration

My other main original inspiration for my original character design was from this image (left) by an artist on Deviantart called Ilona. The simple lines and design, and flat unusual choice of colours. The other one is Phanpy from Pokemon, yet again beady eyes, really stumpy but a better choice of colour, a grey/blue making it a bit more real.

First Animatic..

This is the first animatic, quite shoddy I know, but I'm not that great with Premier or After Effects, next one will be better hopefully! Oh and the score was done by my friend who does music production, it's still not finished yet obviously, there's 2/3 more scenes that need different music.

The indepent minded Elephant - Elliot.

This is Elliot, very basic shapes, very round, he was originally a bit more stumpier than this (which you can see in the animatic after this post), but I didn't want him to look like a baby, but more like a toddler so his legs are a teeny big longer. And as he was based on my toy, who was a yellow elephant I was going to do that, but the setting of the story is a desert/jungle, and I can't really have a yellow elephant strutting around among a yellow/ochre desert :/ so I decided to keep him a blue/grey, he's not supposed to be this blue, that's just me shading in with a blue pencil.

Original Sketch from last year!

This was the original sketch I did in 2nd year, how I had one scene in mind. This is oooold and very bad quality because it's worn out drawing, apologies!

Character Inspiration...

Apologies for the very late starting of this blog! But cutting everything down into a short story, my original inspiration for the idea of my film was from an old elephant toy I had when I was 6, who was called Elliot :) and my nephew's little monkey teddy called Bananas (that's what it says on its label anyway). The idea was the little elephant is travelling with his family and being really indepently minded and somewhat disobedient ends up straying away from his family and not caring so much that he's away from his family. He then bumps into a monkey who shows him around the jungle he's lost in and decides to help him back to his family, along the way bumping into other animals (who were also based on toys) who help them. But I obviously didn't want to animate too many characters, so managed to scratch it down to just the 2.

The original idea I had in mind was something that looked a bit like Heffalump and Elly from Pocoyo. Well having the characters with beady eyes.