When designing an animated world, what visual detail do you focus on first to make it feel alive?
Animation : Curious About Animating Environments by Ashley Renee Smith
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3 months ago
Curious About Animating Environments
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Maybe I don’t think of it as designing a world…
I storyboard a sequence, planning the action, blocking, acting, and camera movement for each shot. These storyboards usually focus on the foreground.
When I get to the point of thinking about backgrounds, that’s when I plan the layout. Layout means planning the action and/or camera moves as they relate to the environment. You want the subject (usually a character) to be framed well, and the background should complement that.
If you look at animation background art, it will feel like something is missing… the characters. Often there will be a hot spot of color where the characters should stand, the point of interest. The colors, the lines, the forms of the background should draw your eye to the point of interest.
So in answer to your question, the composition, color, and forms of the world as they support the story take precedence over any one visual detail.
3 people like this
I start with stylistic choices in the initial sketches to set the tone.
Ashley Renee Smith - although I'm not animator in our company, we typically pull references first and pull the different elements from those references into somewhat of a collage prior to building out the animated world. Hopefully this helps!