Icarus Animation (+ Production Notes)

Icarus Animation  >>>
Plot: Greek Myth about a young man who tries to escape an island prison by attaching feathers to his arms with wax, so he can make wings and fly away. Unfortunately he becomes over confidant, fly's too close to the sun, and the wax keeping his wings together melts under the sun's heat, he falls into the water below and drowns.

PRODUCTION STEP 1 : Visual Inspiration and Concept Art

There's a lot of artwork portraying the mythical character Icarus, so finding a starting point for the character design was easy. I wanted the design to look unique and simple, and I ended up making something that looks very similar to the faceless angels from the French Animated Feature, 'Time Masters', but Icarus's wings are where the arm should be instead of the wings coming out of his back. My drawings have less lines within the body than the ones from Time Masters because I'm not very good at drawing muscle.. Icarus was probably meant to be quite young in the myth so the common depiction of him being really muscular might not be what was intended, but even if he was really strong he wouldn't have been able to fly in real life, birds actually have really big chest muscles and it takes a lot of power to flap wings and fly, not to mention they have hollow bones to make it easier. If a human where to fly with the same technique as a bird it's jest muscles would have to stick out ten feet in front of it. That's an interesting idea for grotesque character design experiments but for this project I stuck to simple and pleasant to look at.
CHARACTER DESIGHN SHEET >>>
This is also concept art, there's no location, the animation focusses almost entirely on the movement of the figure in a black background, using 3 different medias.
STORY BOARDS BELOW 
                     PRODUCTION STEP 2

The first third of the animation was a stop motion

rotation. To do this I cut out some paper wings and white tacked them to the arms of my wooden drawing pose model. Then on the computer I edited the frames to make the figure lighter and the backgrounds blacked out.

PRODUCTION STEP 3

The second third of the animation was Lottie Reiniger inspired paper cut out animation, and the first step to that was creating the figure out of pieces of paper, which I was going to animate. This style of animation was inspired by old European shadow puppet shows.
Production STEP 4

I arranged the body parts into various poses and found it could go into all the positions I needed.

 PRODUCTION STEP 5
The last and longest third of the animation was a rotoscop, I filmed swans fighting and animated over it, I had to draw the figure in every time and I kept some detail from the wings in some of the frames to make it look nice. The last thing to do was draw the feathers onto each of the frames to give the impression of falling and to show he's loosing them.

In the end I think the Rotoscope ended up too time consuming and I came u about 15 seconds short of footage, some of the animation had to be jarringly repeated to add length. There wasn't much to do with the sound other than a sound track and to insert some sounds off birds flying, plus the splash at the end. I just need to put more time into the production in future if I want a better product. My favourite part of this is definitely the final segment.