Animated Short: Ideas & Concept Art

The next stage of our Animated Narratives is to create a 30 second animated short film. After brainstorming several ideas we all seemed to be drawn to a more comedic story rather than a drama or action filled one. The idea we settled on was Shannon's, centered around a family of balloons. One young balloon would dream of being free one day and perhaps escape. We all seemed to agree upon a dark-comedy twist where he is killed at the end once he's finally free. So, we set out doing research into style, narratives, themes, genres and more. Here are some concept sketches of how I imagined the world looking.

For style references I looked to Toy Story (1995), UP (2009), Monsters University (2013) and Inside Out (2015). I liked their colour schemes and settings. They are bright, colourful and full of life.







Some more references we had were "Le Ballon Rouge" (1956), which was a good reference for the movement of balloons. "The Remarkable Rocket" was another good story by Oscar Wilde in which a group of sentient fireworks are discussing being set off into the air to explode. Our general story actually ended up resembling the ancient tale of Icarus, who flew too close to the Sun and perished.