MAGIC - Moodboards, Designs and Storyboarding

To start the creative juices flowing for this brief I began by creating some moodboard, as I normally do, this was from a spider diagram I did basically thinking about the different ideas I wanted to explore.


I settled on the idea of a cat and mouse, where the cat is stirring a cauldron and then the mouse runs by, distracts the cat and it chases it off screen leaving the cauldron to bubble over. It's not the simplest of ideas, however I am going to figure out a way to make it more simple whether this be to buy a mini cauldron or to use a very plain set and props.










Here are my moodboards.

From these moodboards I started to come up with character designs for my main character the cat, and his name is Cleo. I didn't want to go to far into detail with the character designs as it is going to be a puppet so the main things that matter are the fur detailing and his colour. This is because I'm still new to making puppets so I can't guarantee that the final puppet will look exactly like my design on paper.

This was an initial idea for Cleo where I thought of him wearing a wizard's hat.

I then decided that the hat was a little cliche and started drawing a bunch of different designs.

I settled on the top right hand corner design and drew some emotions, which was just for fun as Cleo will not actually be able to express these with the way that his puppet will be designed. However, it still gave me a chance to develop his character.

I next started to plan the layout for the puppet.

After I did some designs for Cleo, I looked into coming up with my storyboard, again I had to keep the shots really simple as I feel that I will struggle to get into the stop-motion studio at college so i might just have to film it where ever I can with a tripod. Keeping this in mind I made sure to use shots that were easy to film and didn't require the crane. I actually at this point decided to go against my original story and went for a completely different narrative that was simpler, used less props and would be a quicker option considering the time left for the year.

Here are my storyboards!

So, now my designs, ideas and storyboard are done my next steps are to build the puppets, scene and come up with an animatic before going on to animate!