This animatic is based on the news article about a woman who poured hot water on another woman. I chose to tell the story from her lawyers’ POV, when they meet the woman for the first time.
Final Animatic
Inspiration
The art direction is kept very simple with rough linework and blocky colours, inspired by a short film from Tokyo University of the Arts. (アニメーション「就活狂想曲」GEI DAI ANIMATION “Recruit Rhapsody”). In terms of characters, HERO Season 2 provided a good reference point for me to start building my characters.
Characters
I started by coming up with basic character bios for the three characters. The difficult part was creating personalities that clash to provide interesting interaction. I find that after establishing basic qualities and moving straight to character design helped visualise the personalities of the characters better for further adjustment.
Working Storyboards / Script
Initially, I worked from storyboards. However I realised that my animatic was going to be driven by dialogue, which made the storyboarding process very difficult since I had no idea what my characters were saying. So I created a script. This part of the process took up the most time, and it was also the most challenging part of the entire assignment. In the end, I did not adhere to most of my working storyboards, and I cut some parts from the script to not make the animatic too draggy.
In the story, I intended to show
- Why the investigations and trials are taking so long over such a small matter -Possibly because of Ms. Wani’s personality
- How Ms. Wani blew up the situation over something small
- Her possible “lies”
- How the lawyers are handling her situation (Not very well)
Click here for HotWaters script.
Visuals
There are two flashbacks in this sequence. To distinguish the two settings better, I used a different colour palette for the flashback scene. For the lawyer’s conference room, I used a blue – green colour scheme. For the flashbacks, I use a purple – pink colour scheme. This is why Ms. Wani’s colour scheme feels out of place in the conference room scenes. The colours of her clothes and hair are matched with her “flashback” to show that that is her “world”.
Towards the end, we see one of the lawyers losing patience, as shown through the feet tapping. We don’t know who it is, as the colours of their pants and shoes are intentionally made the same. It is revealed at the last frame that Cody was the one who burst, even though he seemingly kept his cool throughout. I wanted to show how frustrated the lawyers are with the case.
