Drawing for animation: Herring gull & the giant crab

For a few weeks now we have been developing a project in our 'drawing for animation' classes to do with size and scale . Working in a group of five we have come up with a storyline about an arrogant gull which swoops in after spotting two magpies eating a dropped bit of Cornish pasty near a rock pool. The gull unexpectantly meets its match when this humongous crab emerges from its cave to scare the bird off.

When coming up with the storyline we decided that keeping it simple would actually be more effective, as it would allow us to focus on playing around with the idea of scale. We decided as our characters to feature a massive crab and a smaller seagull. This reverse in scale gives the story a sense of humour as this is not something you would see in the real world. When storyboarding the scenes where the crab and seagull are together we made sure that the angles of our shots would display this diffence in scale, e.g. When looking from the seagulls perspective to have the crab towering over.

Each person in our group was allocated an individual job to complete for our joint presentation at the end of the week. I was given pose sheets/facial expressions for the seagull.

First sketches of seagull

Developed pose sheet