11 second club - pre-production

The 11 second club is a monthly animation competition hosted here.

We have to make an 11 second piece of animation to a sound clip of some dialogue. To hear this sound clip check out the link above or see the video of me acting it out further down in this blog post. (I have entered the November 2010 competition.)

So far I have got to 'just before the animation' stage which I will start doing once I have finished blogging. I'm really looking forward to getting the ball rolling with this. I reckon it will be quite fun to do. Anyways, here is my progress so far showing how I came to my idea up until my final character designs and layouts as well as a funny clip of me acting it out.

Ideas development

Here I have documented how I got to my idea. Some brain storms to start off with (or mind mapping for the politically correct.)

Here is my first idea: A tramp who has stolen a fancy car which is obviously not his. The rich guy comes along and yells at him:

Here I have written out the dialogue along with accents. The red lines not only reflect the tonal range/intensity of the dialogue but will also dictate to some extent the movement of my characters.

My final idea. The chicken finds his egg has been stolen by the fox. The comedy comes from the fact that the chicken is physically way more inferior to the fox yet he will be the one who is persecuting the fox.

Here I wrote out brief instructions of how to act out the dialogue:

Some more initial character sketches:

A rough layout drawing. This is going to be pretty similar to my final layout.

Acting out the soundtrack

Hopefully this will be of much use when it comes to designing my key poses and getting the timing good.. As Derek has mentioned about using L/A reference I will try to intensify the key positions and not just imitate them.

Character Development

I got a bit of research first of real and cartoon chickens..

I used this reference to trace over and draw the volumes of both real and cartoon chickens. Apologies for the poor paper quality - in the future I anticipate not having tea sitting next to my work.

This sheet shows physical characteristics that cartoon chickens share with real chickens as well as physical characteristics that are are not shared with real chickens. Doing this allowed me to figure out the best approach for designing my cartoon chicken.


The chicken with the star next to it is the one I have picked to use as my final character.

As you can see I have retained the real chicken elements of small eyes, small crown, a conical body and small legs. I have played around with the wing and beak sizes. I like the tiny head because it emphasizes the comic nature that he is the persecutor throwing accusations at a fox. Subverting expectations.

I then applied this whole process to the fox:







I got my final design for the fox pretty quickly. When designing both my characters I looked back at my initial sketches (shown higher up on this blog post) so I could keep something of the initial mood I created in the characters.



Final Character Turnarounds and Scene Plan

So here I have got the volumes of the chicken in 4 key turnaround sketches. This will definetly come in useful when animating.

Hopefully I will have the animation completed in this look:

The fox gets the same treatment.

This will be my layout. If time allows then I may think about cuts/close ups etc. but for now I'm happy with this.

I actually spent quite a while drawing this second pose - trying to get the weight balance to look right. In doing so came up with a good working methodology for doing the animation. I will make all the rough key poses in this style, with the red, green and blue lines. It will be much simpler and quicker to do it this way rather then drawing all the volumes for legs, arms and neck. Then following this I should be able to layer on top the final character in a 2nd pass.

Onwards with the animation :)