Final Project in progress

Here are a couple of clips from the first scene. Again, these are templates to be traced so that you will only see a few brushlike highlights of the forms against a nighttime backdrop.

Rough animatic

Swimming Wolves

This is the pack of grey wolf spirits that will carry Lilith for the first part of her journey. I have changed Eve's name to Lilith because she is a far more interesting and obscured figure from the same mythic tradition.
As with the bears, I will rotoscope the form of the wolves and the ripples with painterly effects.

On Friday, the class had a meeting at the National Gallery to show our animatics and get feedback, and hopefully approval, from the tutors, visiting professionals and gallery representatives. It was fascinating to see everybody's work and made me extra excited to see the finished products; some of the plans look like so much fun to animate that I was even a little envious that I wouldn't have the privilege!
I am pleased with the feedback I obtained. The critics were merciless but seemed interested in my ideas and the themes I am exploring. Most importantly for me, they have convinced me to cut out all ancient motifs that aren't clearly linked to the river Thames or English culture. I had wanted to include many interesting mythic figures and symbols from ancient civilisations across Europe and back to the Sumerians at the dawn of civilisation, as I belief these ancient worldviews have trickled down to inform the foundation of the Thames's cultural history. Although I was most interested in ancient English tribal culture, I wished to be as diplomatic and politically correct as possible; to claim ancient English traditions as the source of the Thames's history might seem too anglophilic/anglocentric in a BNP-paranoid climate and exclude all of the citizens of London who are not of English heritage. However, I was persuaded that the ancient English culture I am interested in exploring and expressing has been sidelined by a distortion of what English culture stands for and that I should play a part in redressing the balance.
Today, I visited the British Museum for the first time for some visual research into ancient Celtic imagery and did some sketches of the oldest artefacts with any discernable pattern, some of which came out of the Thames itself! Perhaps I can incorporate the circular motifs into the setting sun and the linear motifs onto the barks of trees.
Here are some of the patterns I have chosen to be most appropriate:

swimming bears

Here is the test of a template I will use to show the bears swimming. These bears, which are actually ephemeral embodiments of the river, will carry Eve for the first stage of her journey before they morph into wolves. I created this animation with clear black lines because I will be rotoscoping them later in photoshop for the desired look.

Mood board

Here are some mythological images I have collected which I find inspiring for the National Gallery project. They are from various traditions, particularly Greco-Roman, Germanic, Babylonian, Celtic, Norse, Egyptian and West Asian.

Eve Design

Below is an image to demonstrate my character design process and how I intend to use symbols, i.e. the different body parts, to do the basic animation.

As you can see, I have carefully made the drawings of Eve from different angles in proportion with one another to enable accurate in-betweens.