LORD MYCROFT ADOLFO OCTAVIUS:
A BETTER MAN GIVES BETTER ADVICE
A BETTER MAN GIVES BETTER ADVICE
THE PROJECT
The final project for my motion design class last semester. We were tasked with creating an original television show and then design, storyboard, and animate a 30 second intro for the television show. I created a character who thinks of himself as the most important and most influential man in the world (he taught the most interesting man in the world everything he knows ;).
THE STORY
Lord Mycroft wants to spread his knowledge to the world and make others better as well. So he has created a talk show in which ordinary folks can call in with their issues and he will resolve them in his own, special way; through the eyes of a privileged billionaire, who has never had to hold a real job, never had to cook, clean, or drive himself. So he has a rather warped view of the world which leads to very comical and often scary resolutions to the caller's problems.
THE PROCESS
To create this animation, I first concepted character designs the old-fashioned way, via pencil and paper. Everything I do starts with pencil and paper, even though I do have a Wacom tablet. After numerous drawings, I finally settled on a design, part Hanna Barbara villian and part magician.
I then set to work storyboarding the animation in my sketch book (I created small thumbnails - about 15 per page). After I was happy with that direction, I set to work listing out the illustration assets I would need and sought out typefaces that gave the right feel to the animation.
Next, I sketched and inked all of the line art I would need for the animation and then scanned this in and brought the scanned images into Illustrator. Using the pen tool (not image trace), I traced over each inked illustration to create clean, vector artwork.
For the final images in the animation, I wanted full color images, so I used both mesh gradients in Illustrator as well as airbrushing in Photoshop to create the final look.
Before I brought all of the visual assets into After Effects, I fired up Cakewalk Sonar and worked on some music for the piece. I wanted a fun, bouncy, big band sound and utilized various sound samples I had to create the music. The final piece that was missing, was a chorus of voices shouting out LMAO's name. For this, my classmates lent their voices and I recorded them for the piece. It worked out quite well and the music and visuals marry nicely.
Finally, I brought everything into After Effects and set to work animating. After importing all of the assets, I then brought in the music to the composition and used that to time the animations of the other assets. I continually tweaked the bezier animation curves in the graphic editor to make sure each animation felt polished.
THE RESULTS
The final animation is extremely close to my original storyboards. I was able to follow through on my concept and deliver nearly exactly what I had envisioned. My professor found it extremely ambitious (given our time period to complete) and very well executed. I entered the animation into the 2017 student Addy's in Sacramento and won a Silver award.
