(Please note, images have been compressed in this blog to preserve website memory space. Please see portfolio page for full renders)
I was really excited to get working on this project when I had first heard about it this semester. While I was having fun with the group project, I felt quite limited with the idea we had and I wasn't fully passionate about what I was working on. For this project I could invest myself fully into something I was engaged with. This assignment was to make a Pitch Bible for a 4 part TV series of my own creation. It required characters, episode descriptions, tech info, production pipelines and backgrounds.
Ideation
Even though I was excited at first, when it finally came down to working on this assignment, I felt sluggish and uninspired. Working on the group project had left me creatively drained and I wasn't sure what direction to take this project. For the first initial draft of this project I walked into the presentations not sure where my head was at. While I knew I wanted to create a project based around my original character Hazel from my Final Year Undergrad, I didn't know what type of show I wanted to make. For my initial ideas I came up with a mood board of shows that inspired me:
I wanted to create a show that was for kids but I was unsure if I wanted to take the route of Bluey and have it be extremely child-friendly with teaching valuable life lessons or to go down the story/plot-line shows like My Little Pony where there is a mixture of plot and filler episodes and would appeal to a slightly older audience. I took some time to go back and forth with my idea and I finally settled on going for a show similar to My Little Pony.
I wanted to make a show aimed at kids aged 7-11 that would follow the story of my character Hazel, a Calico Cat with the power of the stars. I wanted it to follow a similar style to the shows above by being rigged animation on ToonBoom / Adobe Flash / Cel Action. It would be a Comedy / Action / Adventure show that creates fun entertaining storylines but also teaches kids important topics about making friends and being a good person. I've always been interested in Magical Girl shows so I wanted to take elements from these shows and translate it into a kids animal cartoon. I wrote out a quick blurb which I used for my Synopsis below;
In a very simple world a not so simple villainess plans to take over the entire universe and claim it as her own. A group of unlikely friends must come together despite their differences and with their newly bestowed powers of the sky, stop the evil Princess Ember in her quest for total domination.
Hazel sits at the heart of our story. She’s a rambunctious kitty cat who’s number one rule in life is to just have fun. She may come across as a bit rash and childish but that only adds to her charm. She cares deeply about her friends and neighbors and tries to help everyone have a good time. One faithful day Hazel becomes blessed with the powers of the stars to protect her planet and takes on the role as leader of the Starlight Guardians.
Pitch Bible Research
To start with I had a look at some websites that talked about making pitch bibles for animation studios.
Business of Animation had a very helpful article on animation pitch bibles and gave some advice on things to include and not include in a good pitch bible.
Have a good logline : For my pitch bible, I had a short tagline instead of a logline but I made up for the lack of logline through including a brief synopsis.
Animation Characters: While Business of Animation reccomends including side characters, I wouldn't have enough time to fully flesh out side characters so I only created the most important characters featured in the show.
The Setting: Throughout my pitch bible not only do I show pictures of rough background art but I also talk about the setting in the characters biographies and some of the episode descriptions. This will help people understand the types of locations the world has.
Contact Info: Included at the end of my bible so that potential studios can contact me and pick up the story.
CartoonPitch also provided a great infographic on how to make a good pitch bible, which I referred back to while creating my bible.
While this isnt something I'm creating to be sent to studios, I wanted to try and create something as realistic as possible so I had good experience for future pitch attempts if thats something I want to do down the line.
I looked at a few different pitch bibles online from cartoon network and artists on artstation that helped me layout the deisgn of my own pitch bible you can check them out here:
Nearer to the end of the deadline I had the privelage of attending a talk on the Moon Restaurant Discord Server which is a server ran by Yula W. who worked on the Netflix movie Nimona. The talk was given by Seraphina Bewick (a pitch bible coordinator for Cartoon Network) and covered what studios like CN are looking for when scouting pitch bibles. I took many notes on this talk and some screenshots to help. She went over how to make a pitch bible and also the places you can go to network and pitch your stories.
Characters
Since Hazel had already been designed in my undergrad I had a fair idea in my mind for how I wanted my characters to look. I showed a few examples of art I did of Hazel to Mike and Sarah and the general feedback was to make sure and draw her and the other characters in a way that matched the storyline and its target audience. Chibi-cutesy characters would be more suited to a pre-school show that doesn't have a plotline, the kind of characters that are chubbier, baby looking and maybe dont have realistic proportions. Characters with a bit more detail and better proportions would suit primary school children and a show that was more plot-driven. With that in mind I tried to keep the cute-vibe of my characters but give them a bit more detail than I usually drew them.
I looked particularly at the style of Care Bears: Unlock the Magic and My Little Pony. I noticed that all the characters followed a cookie-cutter body or style that was slightly altered to suit their personalities and characteristics. The only things that were slightly altered would be things like hair, eyes and accessories/clothing, the odd time body shapes would be altered (Big Mac from MLP has a stocky body type compared to normal ponies). I used this as the basis of my designs, I would perfect the body type of my characters and repurpose it for each character and make small changes to suit each character. I made a quick line-up of all my characters below:
I tried to use shape language also with my characters. Each character has rounded features to appeal more to children with Princess Ember having more sharper edges than the rest of the characters to imply her villainess title. Each character features elements that relate back to their powers and personalities.
Hazel: Has a star decorating her ribbon to indicate power over the stars. She is also a calico cat which are known to have sassy and spunky personalities; this matches up to her being the leader and having a playful and mischevious attitude.
Archie: Features a grey and white fluffy coat which links towards his more mellow and calm personality and his power of the clouds. The blue bandana around his neck is a nod at the power to control the rain inside clouds.
Luna: She has a darker and more sleek coat to relate back to her sophisticated personality and how self-concious she is of herself and her looks, trying to keep herself as groomed as possible. Her coat and collar are of a purple hue which is often used to show royalty, luxury and power. She features a purple collar around her neck with a moon charm to symbolise her moon powers.
Sunny: Her name is not only a link to her powers but is also a funny nod to the fact that there is a breed of bear called sun bears. Her golden fur is also a nod towards her powers but it also represents her bright and kind personality. She has a gold collar around her neck with a sun symbolising her sun powers and is also the counter part to Lunas Moon collar.
Daisy: She was most inspired by the Milka Chocolate Cow with her colour palette, I paired the gold/orange hue of her horns and bell as a complimentary colour to the purple. Daisy features a lot of rounded shapes to match her shy and sweet personality and her eyes are designed to be more drooped than others to imply this further. She wears a rainbow hue collar and bell around her neck to imply her power over rainbows.
Princess Ember: I tried to keep with the rounded features but mixing in more pointy elements of her design to keep that villain look. I made her a bat as I found in my research that bats are commonly used as enemies in media with their bat wings correlating to demons. She has a darker and muted colour palette to symbolise her evil personality and she features red accents to push this further.
For their character profiles in the pitch bible I choose to pose them in ways that would be able to express their personalities easily before you even read their descriptions
Backgrounds
For my backgrounds I kept to my theme of looking at shows from Cartoon Network (or similar) and seeing what kind of styles they used. Below is a moodboard of some of my favourite backgrounds:
I liked different elements of different styles of backgrounds. Some of the shows I looked at used a lineless style while others choose to have sketchier loose line-art that still blended in well with the background. I was mostly drawn to using lines in my backgrounds so I went with that as my basis. For colours the one thing that stood out to me was the use of vibrant colours, but not too vibrant that your characters don't mesh with the backgrounds. This was a struggle throughout the process for me but I inserted my characters into my backgrounds as I coloured so I could adjust as needed.
I started with a simple external shot of the night sky for my backgrounds. I knew there would be establishing shots in my show to imply time passing, or to nod back to the relation to the sky and space so I thought this was a perfect start as it was simple but allowed me to get a grip on the way I wanted to style the backgrounds. I followed my moodboard above and looked at how those artists created their backgrounds. I decided that while I was going to use a line-art style for my work, this night-time shot would work best without lines. I knew I wanted to keep clouds and moon line-less (my rule of thumb was anything sky based wouldnt need lines), but I choose not to line the trees in this shot to have a greater emphasis on a nighttime silhouette.
My second shot I did another external but in the daylight, this shot would be of a bit of Daisys farm that would be used in Episode 3. I looked closely at how bluey used colours, in particular its shades of green to colour the foliage in its shots. This was also when I started to notice that a lot of my backgrounds used quite a bit of texture here and there to off-set from the solid coloured characters. I decided I would try out adding the textures in with the shading to see how it would work. I was really happy with the way this background came out and Aodhan gave me feedback on my use of depth and advised me to add a blue hue to the field in the distance to help show that its farther away.
For my final backgrounds I wanted to do an interior shot of what the inside of the cock-pit of Princess Embers spaceship woul look like and a loose concept of her home-planet inside the blackhole. I struggle a lot with perspective with my backgrounds so for this piece I went onto YouTube, looked up some videos on perspective and also looked up more references for ships and the type of feelings I wanted to create. This included looking at more red hues to invoke the idea of a 'bad guy', broken planets
Here are the final concepts:
Overall Im very pleased with the interior shot I did of the ship. The perspective was not something im very confident in but I think I managed to keep perspective looking as accurate as I could and really tried to work on my lighting for that shot. I think the exterior shot of the planet is too dark and doesnt establish the shot well, but I was trying to imply that the galaxy inside the blackhole was very dark and dreary. It was a very quick concept of the idea I had, and I wanted to put it in the pitch bible so that if someone were to read through it, they'd get a better visual on how 'bad' Princess Ember and her planet is.
Title Card / Poster + Final Thoughts
For my title card / poster design I wanted to go for the classic movie poster vibes that a lot of action and adventure movies have with a 'villain' character. These posters usually feature the main character as its biggest focal point, followed by the other sub-main characters around them and the villain much larger and in the distance, creating a menacing look of doom for the main characters. I really like these posters as they have a way of showing a lot of character. Below I've included a few examples of these:
With that in mind I went ahead and came up with a quick poster. I followed the rules of my backgrounds and kept to vibrant colours and tried to do a little bit of design work on the font for my title by adding some ears to letters. Overall I ended up really happy with my poster, I think it captured each of the characters well and helped set the tone for the kind of show I wanted to create.
Im really happy with the way my pitch bible turned out in the end. I was worried about the time constraints involved with the project but as my motivation and passion started to pick up I found myself being more and more eager to draw lots of things and I became really engrossed in the world I was creating! I'd like to take this further into my Major project an either animate a snipet of an episode or possibly animate the opening theme of the show. I could've taken more time on some of the backgrounds and pushed myself to play more with perspective in shots to improve my skills, but for the basis of just getting the idea of the art and story across I think they do a good enough job!
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