Background design

For the story location I imagined the area to be quite similar to where I stayed in Japan. I would like to involve my own experience and moreover this makes it a lot easier for me to get a feeling of the space and look of the set.

It will take place in an urban surrounding starting off in a quite residental area. From the looks I intend to be not distinctive of a certain country. I want it to look as if i could be in any city in the world.

This is a first background design showing the main character's house. It will be used in the opening scene. The outlines are pencil drawings. I sepearted this background in five layers so I can have the main action taking place on the roof top.

For colouring I scanned my outlines and coloured them on photoshop. This is sort of the style I want to go for; blockcolours with strong shades and light and some gradient. Maybe I will try to bring in some more texture, but I will save this decision until I made some more backgrounds. Compared to the characters I want the backgrounds to be rather detailed. The Level of detail however will be dependant on the production schedule.

This is a floorplan of the area in which the animation will take place. The story begins at Hiko's, the main character's house (1) which I marked red. The orange line represents the street she is following. The red dots are other areas which will appear in the film, so I will design backgrounds for these places. The last corner that leeds into the big street is where she enters the festival. The big street (2) is where the festival takes place so the backgrounds there will suddenly become much more colourful and detailed and from then on you can clearly see that the story takes place in Japan.

Here is some concept art, a rough pencil drawing, of how the festival will look like. Many colourful gates hanging over the middle of the street. For the actual animation yet I will choose shots in which it is not necessary to animate the stripes.