Idea & Concept

Story Ideas

The story process from the beginning underwent many changes to draw strong focus on the theme and core idea. Once we established the focus, the story and edit continued to evolve and adjust to better suit the flow of the story. 
The beginnings of the story was about a boy who struggled with his identity, marked by his shadow. Based on this idea, we each developed short vignettes to create a story for this young boy and how he dealt and accepted his shadow. 

Storyboard

Initial Storyboard - By Juan Chacon

Above are some pages from the initial storyboard based on the established theme. At this early stage we locked down many of the shots, cameras and ideas, although we found that some were ideas were repetitive and others were too subtle so we decided to cut some and enhance others. 

Animatic

A small portion of the animatic after creating the storyboard. It gave as the first looks of how the film would work as a while, by allowing us to plan the timing of shots and trial music and sound to help evoke emotion. Animatic and edit by Juan Chacon

Character Concepts

James' Expressions

As with the story process and many others, the characters constantly evolved. With the story taking place over the James' life time, this became a major obstacle, aging him and some of the other characters. Showing James' growth from a young child to a teen and through to an elderly man required three variations of James, two for Joe plus a costume variation in the pool environment. For mostly this reason we chose to reduce the amount of characters, which also allowed for a stronger focus on James and his journey.

The direction of the characters was a combination of a caricatured human with hints of creatures to create a stylised design while maintaining that they could fit into a human-world environment. The simplistic and exaggerated head and facial features allowed us to draw focus on the emotions and reactions of the characters.

Child, Teen & Elderly James
Initial Proposed characters - Designed by Nur Erguven

Environment Concepts

We decided at an early stage the film should have a stylistic effect based on a painted texture. Using matte paintings rather than 3D textured environments had many benefits, such as reducing the render times and adapting the characters to those backgrounds gave the film a stylistic flare. However it did create other obstacles mainly where camera movements were required. Animation, camera layout and the matte paintings had to adapt to one another when adjustments were made to any one of them or any story changes. This realisation early on opened our eyes to constantly reviewing the edit and conducting look development tests and renders. 

Environment Concepts, Retirement Home, Street & Gym - By Sahan Gamage

The Room model was adapted from the concept design of James' room. The models aided in the animation process, giving the animators an indication of space and ease in setting up the cameras. From this point the camera's would be rendered out with an Ambient Occlusion, Basic lighting and diffuse passes adding depth to the matte paintings. 

James' Room Concept & Base model for Matte Paintings - Environment Modelling By Josh Pedersen