OUAN406 - Applied Animation - A Tale In The Sting - Cbeebies Production Process

The original plan for this idea was to create it using Dragonframe stop motion. However, I didn't really feel comfortable enough using the software alone so I decided to do it digitally.
I've kept the character for this as simple as I could, as I thought simplicity was best when it comes to designing characters for children as there wouldn't be any features on the character that could scare the child.
The character is heavily influenced by Bloo from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.

I've always been a fan of his design. He's as simple as you could probably get, yet he has so many expressions. I remember always liking him as a kid and the simplicity really did appeal to me personally so I thought he'd be a good reference to help create my character.

This animation was again created using SAI. I used the curve tool mostly on this, as it gives a really smooth finish. I've decided to go for a pastel colour palette for this ident as I think it's more suitable for a channel for infants - it seems calmer somehow over the bold colours the idents for Cbeebies usually have. 

The paths on the curves are really easy to manipulate which give a nice fluid effect when watching them whilst animated. 

The facial features of the character are all on different layers so they are easy to move about. 

Once I'd drawn the frames in SAI, I imported them into Photoshop to see how they'd pan out as an animation. It does sound like it'd be incredibly time consuming but it really isn't. 

I do have every intention of learning Photoshop properly (as I've previously stated), I just feel so much more comfortable illustrating in SAI. I'll practice my illustration techniques in Photoshop over the summer. 

Once I'd had all my frames, I exported the layers as .jpeg files to have the correct aspect ratio for the animation.

I then opened the frames as an image sequence in QuickTime player to create the mov file.

I then added the sounds for the ident. I acquired the slide whistle sound effects from freesound.org but the background music is copyrighted to Nintendo. I do realise that I wouldn't be able to use this if I were creating these for profit, but for the sake of a small, unprofitable project I think it'll be fine. The track works really well in my opinion. 

Here is what I had to show for my final crit. I was instructed to change the Cbeebies logo from my own to their actual logo to make it look a lot neater. 
Other than that, the idea gained pretty positive feedback.