Project Hiroshi- Week 1

For this Design for Media class, we do 3 projects throughout the course of the semester. Each project is inspired by a faculty member in the department, and then we take our own spin off from there. This Project was inspired by Hiroshi Hayakawa. He has 2 different styles to his artwork [see here], and therefore we had 2 choices with this project. "Figure as Landscape" where the figure blends into or becomes the landscape and the viewer sees first a landscape, and then a figure. Or we could do a menagerie, because Hiroshi enjoys making paper animals, and has created a few books about them, which you can see here.

I chose the first prompt, though my definition of "figure" falls more into the menagerie prompt. I decided to make my main character a bunny, hopping along in a landscape. It is a simple story, but because this is my first animation, I wanted to worry more about the mechanics and less about the storyline.

The animation will start out with a close up on leaves/landscape/foliage (still to be decided) with the bunny hiding among them. The viewer doesn't realize the bunny is there, until it jumps out of the frame. The next sequence is a very zoomed out view of the landscape, where the bunny hops across the frame from left to right. Finally the bunny stops, the background is white, and a piece of the "title" (still to be decided) is visible. The bunny smiles and rears back to take a bite out of the text...and then it cuts to the bunny sitting next to the title...minus a bite.

I think this is something that I can accomplish in 4 weeks, this first week was for planning and sketching, next week I will do the environments and final look of the bunny. Then weeks 3&4 can be dedicated to animation.