AdventuRats
Production of concept art for a short idea for an animated project, including character designs, key props, environments, and beat boards.
Solo Project
Development
Produced during my second year of QUT for unit KNB136: Visual Storytelling: Production Design in 2024, this assignment involved selecting a poem from Edward Lear's The Book of Nonsense to use as inspiration.
Additionally, I was partially inspired by the opening of the Disney movie Ratatouille, as well as the Mouse World trope, to create a story about rats living in an old man’s house and exploring said house in search of food and resources, treated as a dangerous and exciting journey. I thought that this story would work well as a 2D animated adventure, with a target audience aiming towards children, reminiscent of older Disney movies.
Characters
For characters I focused on a lead hero and villain character, but I also considered the design of secondary characters.
The protagonists are a trio of rats, journeying through the old man’s house to find food and resources as an exploration team.
Protagonist: Macy, a brand new member of the exploration team. She is brave and confident, but naive. She is excited to become a member of the exploration team and is unaware of the full danger of her role. Macy is proud to help the rest of the rats.
Secondary Protagonist: Rolf, a veteran of the exploration team who is good at fighting. He is a serious and grouchy rat but always works hard for the exploration team. He is protective of the other rats and is well respected as a result of his hard work.
Secondary Protagonist: Arthur, another veteran of the exploration team and skilled scout. He is willing to do his job but finds exploration team work cumbersome. Arthur is quick and sneaky, making him good at his job, but his personality makes him hard to like.
Character Design - Rats
I decided that the rats should have an anthropomorphic design, inspired by the mice in Cinderella and The Rescuers. I wanted to aim for a simple and appealing design, to be easier to animate as well as for audiences to quickly understand.
The rat designs use rounder shapes to give a friendlier appearance, with the variations in snout, ear, and body shapes help to differentiate characters and their silhouettes.
-
Overall I wanted the rats to have a warmer tone. For outfits, I decided that all the exploration team rats would wear something red around their neck. This both ties their designs closer together while also being used to show their personality.
I also drew poses, expressions, and turnarounds to explore the characters further.
Characters
For the antagonists, since I decided the protagonists of the story would be rats stealing from an old man for resources, it would be natural to make the antagonist a cat owned by the old man.
Antagonist: The Cat, also known as “Mittens” by his owner. A cat which despises rats, as one of his eyes was injured by rats in the past, and gleefully hunts them down. He is the biggest risk on the rats’ journey, but his one weakness is the bell around his neck that the rats use to tell where he is.
Secondary Antagonist: The Old Man, who spends most of his days sleeping in a rocking chair in the living room. Feared by the rats since he used to kill them, he exists as more of a passive threat compared to his cat.
In contrast to the anthropomorphic rats, I wanted the cat to have more realistic proportions, similar to the Disney move Cinderella, with the cat Lucifer compared to the mice. Like the rats, I wanted to aim for a simple design, balancing appeal with ease of animation.
To contrast the rats’ rounder designs, the cat emphasises sharp edges and triangles, creating a dangerous silhouette. The cat and old man also use cooler colours to contrast the warmer ones of the rats.
I tried to keep silhouettes unique and easy to read, even when comparing the vast difference in height between characters.
Environments
I designed sketches for multiple different environments the story takes place in.
The rats house is styled as a miniaturised version of a human house, following the Mouse World trope mentioned previously. The Old Man's house is shown from low angles to emphasise the height differences between humans and rats.
I then created more detailed and polished environments for three areas, the rats' home, the old man's living room, and the old man's kitchen, at different times of day to further explore the environment of the story.
Beat Boards
These beat board thumbnails show the main story points of the narrative. As these are thumbnails, I primarily used shades of grey. However I also used some colour to distinguish important items such as the rats’ neckwear and the Cat’s eyes. For some backgrounds, I used a very basic 3D layout of the room made in Blender to help with a consistent layout in more complex scenes.
A major challenge I found with these beat boards was the positioning of the rats. Due to their big ears and snout, it was easy for them to block the view of things behind them, including the other rats and sometimes the Cat. This meant that it was important to consider positioning, including sometimes having more unrealistic or exaggerated positioning to avoid blocking faces or creating unclear silhouettes.
