Experimenting With Hut Designs

Today I have been experimenting with potential designs for the hut in my animation. Given that the hut essentially plays the role of the main character in my animation, it is imperative that the design is as appealing to as broad a demographic as possible and conveys the personality and mood necessary to tell my story in an entertaining and engaging way.

In earlier posts, I had a basic look into the general form the hut might take. This was primarily inspired by imagery gathered through my early mood-boards:

Left: An image from one of my initial mood-boards
Right: A sketch I produced showing my interpretation of the hut as it could look in an animation

Over the past few days I have been considering how I could take this idea forward towards a design that could actually be used in my animation. Here are some developmental pieces I produced in order to test various ideas and concepts I had regarding the potential design:

An early piece of development art for the hut

The above design is the first piece in which I experimented with using elements of the hut's design to express emotions and give the building a slightly more human appearance, helping the audience to connect on an emotional level with the hut as a character.

I then decided to take this idea forward with a more in-depth look into how it could work. Above you can see how I developed the idea of using circular windows as eyes to convey the hut's reaction to its surroundings. I think this idea works very well, is as much as it does lend a subtle human feel to the hut,  however having the expressions change during the animation may be somewhat too abstract and cartoony for the kind of animation I want to produce, which will hopefully be a fairly traditional piece of digital 2D animation. In the illustrative piece above, it can also be noted that from the front, I have subtly attempted to give the hut a similar form to the human face, this will hopefully add to the effect I am trying to achieve.

The idea of having they facial expressions change during the animation strikes me as something that would be more suited to a 3D animation style, where the principles of squash and stretch can be more easily exploited in non-human elements. An example of this is the film 'Monster House', a film which was screened recently as part of the Research and Development for Animation module.

The technique works fantastically in this film, however I would argue that the key reason for this is that Monster House is a horror film and the concept of an inanimate object coming to life can very easily go wrong (or in this case, right) and look very creepy, perhaps due to the uncanny valley effect.

To conclude, I feel the use of human attributes in my design for the hut is a good idea, however I also feel that the more subtly this can be achieved, the better. It is most likely I will simply give the hut a fixed facial expression to convey the general mood of the piece.