Ngorongoro Crater - Concept Research - Thirsty Planet

As part of this project I have been given the role of being the concept artist, which means I have to responsibility of coming up the the overall feel of the animation and the different aspects within it.

I first wanted to look at the landscape and concept behind the environments as this is a really important part to the animation. I found a website: http://www.inaturalist.org/guides/467 where it goes through all different plants in the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania, one of the sub saharan African countries which PumpAid provide for. I wanted to focus on one location for concept inspiration so I could get an overall look to the different plants and trees there.







The main tree that's very famous to Africa is the Acacia tree, which looks like the image below. I really love the shape of this tree, so I began painting and looking into it's shape so we could use the silhouette of it in the final animation. I also looked at the leaves on this tree as they had a very interesting shape to them and this could also be used as an abstract shape in the animation. Below are the paintings I came up with done in watercolour and pen.