My initial idea was to have a bug like creature integrating and living in a human lifestyle, similar to my final idea but the difference is that I wanted this bug creature to be loosely based of a mythological creature called the changeling. Changelings were creatures that switched themselves with babies and disguised themselves as human children while the other changelings took the original child away. I wanted to loosely base my bug creature off these mythological ones by having my bug seem human to everyone else but to use as the audience appear like a freakish looking bug. My bug creature would pass through reflections and such to notify the audience that they may SEEM human but obviously it is not. I decided to simplify that idea and just make it a regular giant moth living life as a human, with the humor coming from seeing a bung interacting/reacting to human things and situations. My final idea is much simpler and easier to work with than my initial idea.
The most successful aspect of my film is my moth character, who I actually put a lot of thought into with it’s design. I wanted my creature to look expressive and appear to have some character yet still look weird and out of place in the world that it inhabits:
I wish I could have shown even more expression with the moth creature I made, similar to the expressions seen in my sketches. I had lots of problems and errors with the resources I was using to make my film which caused me to cut some corners and lessen the creature’s expressions, for time purposes. I feel like I barely peaked with the expressions I could have used in my film.
During this whole process I learned that animation takes a lot of time to great right, it’s a long process that gives a big reward, but only at the end when everything is complete. Creating an animation is a skill that I like having but creating an animation that I’m REALLY proud of under the time constraints of about a month for a homework assignment is frustrating because I want to make it better but at the same time you only have so much time to work on it before you have to hand it in. Despite that I still feel proud of the creation I made because I know that it was hard work getting from my initial idea to an actual film. I now respect even more all the animators out their who do this for a living, because animation is hard and tedious work. At the end of the day, creating my character was fun and making that character come to life in my film makes me happy.
Storyboards:
Playing around with the color balance helped me decide an idea for my final film (That idea was changing the color of my moth to correspond with the time of day:
