Great Smokey Mountains
WPA Great Smokey Mountains poster as an animation.
Prompt
For this project, I wanted to try and take a static poster that already existed and turn it into an animation. Of all the posters I could think that I'd love to animate, my mind landed on the old WPA National Park posters. The one I decided to pick was the Great Smoky Mountains poster, specifically the one that features a family of bears. After selecting the poster to use, all that was left was to figure out how I wanted the story of the animation to go and how all of the transitions would play out as it switched from one scene into something that looked like the original still of the poster.
Original WPA National Park posters. Images from Google.
Story Board / Research
After thinking about it for some time, I came to the idea that I'd like the animation to start early in the day and as the day would go on the bears would come in. After the bears would get into place, the sun would be set at the correct position and the boarder would encroach, allowing for the text of the poster to be revealed. I went through and storyboarded it and made sure that the sky started off vibrant and would dull out as it got to later in the day. At this time, I wasn't sure what I'd have the bears do as they moved over to the tree, but I knew that I wanted them to walk over.
Mood board used for reference. Images from mood board from Google.
Initial Animation
Initially I had the bears move in rather stiffly in order to figure out their pathing and what they'd do while moving over. I thought of having the cubs play and/or fight each other and eventually climb up the tree, but I actually ended up scratching that idea. What I landed on in the final animation was of the mother bear looking at a river, waiting to catch a fish for her cubs, which then pans out from her eye to reveal every one of the animals in place. I made sure to have each cub, along with the mother, moving here and there in order to not look static and had the clouds in the back shift.