The Story
A curious girl leads an unexciting life in a dull, organised, black and white world, where there’s a proper way of walking, looking, and even eating soup. Her attempts to bring more amusement into the picture are met with a strong disapproval of society and of her rule-obeying mother.
When the girl follows a strange cat who doesn’t fully fit into society’s black and white standards, she discovers a boisterous underground filled with life.
She decides to introduce the underground to the surface and shake up the dreariness of the world around her, but finds her greatest opponent at her own home. The girl’s mother rejects everything that has become dear to her daughter and any trace of a connection between them seems lost — until the mother opens her eyes for the first time and sees what she has become. It’s up to her to fix their broken relationship.
Visit here for more information : http://www.dottykultys.com/CATZ/Catz.html
Dotty created a list of key words for two world, to help us findng inspiration and direction. Not only the general key words, the characters also had the description for them.
I useed the black & white world list to research and designed. It helped me to catched the effect we wanted.
Written, produced and directed by: Dotty Kultys
Black & white background and character design: Szu Yu Chen
Colour background and character design: Justine Saint-Lo
Animation and compositing: Dotty Kultys, Szu Yu Chen, Nicola Dunlop, Hoda Touny
Sound and music design: Dave Yapp
Dubbing mix: Brian Moseley
Voices: Dotty Kultys, Justine Saint-Lo, Dave Yapp, Szu Yu Chen, Nicola Dunlop, Marek Nekola
Pre-Production
Character concept by Dotty Kultys.
Black & White world concept by Dotty Kultys.
Material
I was assigned as the designer for the black and white world for this project. The initial idea was to use paper with printed images to collage the background and the characters, and use the stop-motion with the paper cut out technique to animate. However, in order to coordinate this as an appropriate project that is suitable for a group work/ collaboration, and to make the project more media diverse, we decided to create an animation that is seemingly paper cut-out animation style, but also uses digital technique with Photoshop and After Effect.
Materials collaged by Suyu
Character Design
The character’s initial concept and individual criteria were given by the director. This consisted of personality, wants, needs and fears. The original idea was to use paper to design, but I wanted to use the paper to collage the pattern and then assign it to the character that I had drawn, which can reduce the time it may cost by repeating the process of making patterns. It also can be a more efficient and diverse way of using different patterns on different characters and other designs.
Character draft by Suyu.
Character design by Suyu.
I took many pictures of buildings in Bristol, which maintain many building styles we need. I used Photoshop to manipulate the building by changing windows and roofs. A good thing about a black and white style world is that it reduces the blemishes which might be seen in composed images. The first design of street and buildings, looks too prosperous and busy like New York city with its many skyscrapers, that the director did not want. On the contrary, what we were looking for was a solemn city.
Background Design
Buildings in Bristol.
Background design by Suyu.
Designed by Suyu.
Newspaper content by Dotty Kultys.
Props Design
Soup design develpoment by Suyu.
Composition Test by Suyu.
Colour, cat design by Justine Saint-Lô
Before starting the animation, we made the test, putting the character and background together, to see if the characters and background suit eachther, and to see what the visual could be.
Characters & Background Composition Test
Designed, animated by Suyu.
Colour by Justine Saint-Lô.
Animation process by Suyu.
Animation
