Home to a collection of artworks and photography by David Billingsley
Days at The Beach (2017) Pre Production
"Days at The Beach"
Finally, it has dawned upon me, I'm now tasked to create a final major animation which will help to portray and solidify my talents and abilities as an animator.
After dealing with some rather open minded views for last years final project, I decided to take a step back in that regard, back to the place which held a massive significance in my life, The Beach. The Beach offered me a place in which I felt I could be free to explore and explore I did, discovering caves and many rock pools filled with a variety of sea life.
While thinking back to my early fishing days as a kid, an idea popped right into my head, an idea in which to base my story on. It included a young boy named "Billy" who goes to the beach to fish and manages to catch a Crab, unexpectedly the duo offer a variety of comedic possibilities as they become great friends. This ultimately lead me to base the story within a children's storybook, with a poetic narrative carrying the plot forward.
This page represents the pre production stage of this project. Providing glimpses of the characters designs and aided research needed towards the films final production. I am currently in the development stage, working towards crafting the characters and sets and further, animating and editing them all together.
See you guys on the other side !
- Dave (February 2017)
In the story, there are four distinct themes which play an important role towards these characters, these are Excitement, Calmness, Interaction and Sadness to Happiness
After solidifying the story, I took it upon myself to research children's books for inspiration. Here, I decided to take and compare the colours from these books towards real life colours found on the beach.
I found that both real beaches and children's books do share some similarities. The children's books however convey more subtle and primary colours compared to realistic beaches. Overall, this helped to determine appropriate colours towards my story.
While developing, I noticed that I needed to have a rock pool filled with water in order to complete the set. This pointed me towards researching different array of methods other Stop Motion Animators used. Preferably, I decided to stick with Hair gel, due to its controllable nature.
The next massive obstacle was to animate sand. A rather strenuous task to perform however, these animators have managed to pull it off spectacularly ! Inspiring me to try out some variety of techniques including wet glue, proper sand or even "kinetic sand".
Starting with my first characters development Billy, he was a rather tricky character to portray on paper than in my mind. I experimented with some shapes, trying to achieve my characters disireble dimensions right, leading to many pages of structural development.
By chance, I acquired another skilful member to join me with this project. Matt Dixon, a talented concept artist was tasked by me to draw out my characters with unintentional colour qualities. The end result made my hair stand up on end and in an instant, I fell in love with the colour and shapes of these two characters.
Here I started to put Billy into different poses in order to get a feeling of what his body can achieve for animating.
After finishing Billy's design, I moved onto the simplistic design of The Crab, hoping to add something which wouldn't ruin the design. They ranged from adding streaks of seaweed, a hat and, even a bow tie.