After looking back over all of my research, I began to see a clear theme of interest throughout my work. I decided to focus on the Royal Naval College and the history behind it. For my brief I decided to think about the problems surrounding the area and something that affected me personally. I found the lack of information on offer about the heritage of the buildings was something I could begin to explore solving. This lead me to thinking about the Royal Naval college charity organisation as my client . “The Greenwich foundation for the Royal naval College has employed me create educational piece, possibly using illustration and multimedia to heighten awareness of the history of the building.”

I began by experimenting with story boards as I think they area really effective and simple way of conveying narrative along with information. I researched similar existing animations on vimeo and based this first draft on a film about the Greenwich observatory. I really liked the pacing and presentation of the information, for example it started with a map of England, then zoomed into show where Greenwich was. Then using a variety of other exciting screen transitions, manipulated old-time illustrations into puppets. I tried to mimic this narrative style in my own story board and plans as I think this would work very well for my client .

Using the pictures I took of the college, I traced the buildings into a story board plan roughly based on my quick initial concepts.

Developing on the story board concept, I scanned in some of the frames from my initial story board and using Photoshop I layered washes of colour in inspired by the illustrator Jorge Gonzalez, whose own style echo's that f baroque and Rembrandts colour pallet. I like the idea of developing these into backgrounds for an animation. I think this would be a natural step to take on from story boarding and would work well for my client, for example it could be shown on their website.

This lead me onto looking at character design and developing my own characters inspired by the artist Carter Goodrich. I began by choosing the four key figures in the history of the area, Henry 8th, Charles 2nd, Christopher Wren and Thomas Thornhill. What I was particularly inspired by Goodrich’s approach to character designs were use of exaggerated shapes. I experimented with different approaches of distortion and used Goodrich’s signature crosshatching mark making to finish the designs.

Combining ideas

Stop motion and collage, using photo shop I was editing a the clock tower in the distorted style of terry Gilliam. I think these would be a good starting point to cut out and create a stop motion animation with

Developing on from collaging, I started to look into using stop motion silhouette puppets to tell stories. I think the silhouette of the clock tower looks very sticking and wold be a great background for an animation. I also like the idea of looking more int o animating with stop motion