The space for my chase

Part of our assignment to create a high-speed chase sequence was to create layouts and backgrounds of the space in which the chase occurs. As with the character designs, I decided to use a setting I'd already created and thought I knew well: my aliens characters' part-barn, part-wrecked spaceship hideout, which I sketched out based on a real barn in Bishop's Cleeve in June 2014:

I wanted a base for my characters that really looked like a melding of two worlds, and while I was happy with the exterior design, this assignment made me realise I hadn't thought about the interior all that much. Part of the brief was to have the characters go up some stairs, but my tutor told us this could be interpreted loosely, so I designed some "stairs" formed from the large plates of metal of the spaceship. As I imagined why Katsuko might be running up those stairs, I came up with the scenario of Ikki chasing her and appearing menacing to the audience - but in reality, he's just trying to give her her homework.

After doing those rough drawings, I did a slightly more refined cross-section of the wreck, with a bit of colour:

And from there, it was time to start creating layouts, concept art and backgrounds.

I did these layouts extremely rough in cheap ballpoint pen so I wouldn't be precious about them; in the process I was reminded that what looks nice as a background might not be practical as an animation. The original number of "steps" would take Katsuko more than 20 seconds to climb, so I stripped them down to three.

I'm not really sure what came over me when I did that strangely Tim Burton-esque cross hatching on the right. I think I wanted to give my brain a break from the tough intellectual work of planning shots and let both my mind and pen wander for a bit. Needless to say, it doesn't reflect how the shot will look in the final film.

Once I'd got each shot down on paper, I transferred the sequence into a more compact, manageable format, long favoured by storyboard artists: post-it notes.

This spread was my frame of reference when drawing the animatic proper. It took a week of drawing in Photoshop, and in the process I learned a lot about how to compose shots and depict camera moves - for the latter, creating master backgrounds that I could reposition and copy/paste into each PSD file at my leisure proved very helpful.

Shot 4 was especially tricky to get my head around at first, so I created a full-on layout that charted both Katsuko and the camera's journey up the metal "steps". For extra efficiency, this setup allowed me to copy and paste each rough pose into the PSDs and tighten them up on a new layer.

 Although constructing the animatic was hard work, I survived because the work was drawing, which I love - and because I took breaks to work on other things related to the project (the bizarre, beautiful paradox of being an animator). In this case, my breaks took the form of colour explorations - sadly there's no way I'll have time to actually colour the sequence, but if I did, these are the colours I'd use.

They started with this absent-minded felt tip pen scribble:

The colour choices were more or less just because those were the first ones that came to hand, but it made me realise a reddish sky would help create a tense, "post-apocalyptic" atmosphere, so I ran with that when I did these watercolours in my sketchbook:

This one started as a doodle of Jull (another Mudskipper character) but evolved into an exploration of the earthy floor of the aliens' hideout in shot 4, and how the purple wing of their ship might reflect light - a good example of how one should never discard a mere "doodle."

All these fed into the final animatic: since I didn't have the luxury of the time it takes to add colour, I had to convey the mock-tense mood through other means (namely, the timing, the composition of the shots and the choice of music). Creating a colour animation set in the world of Mudskipper would be a fun project, someday...