For this project, I want to try to do something a little different. Instead of cutting away to a fully animated scene, I want to try to animate a character on top of my real-life footage for the entire video. I'm not sure how feasible such an idea is with tweening since I'm not particularly familiar with the tools we'll be using yet, but if not, I'll probably have to animate the character frame by frame on top of my footage.
My story idea is pretty simple: The video follows a day in the life of a main character (likely played by me unless I rope some friends in, TBD), who happens to have an unusual companion: the monster under their bed. This goopy, formless creature, black in color but with splashes of neon here and there, often takes the form of a black """cat""", and accompanies the main character throughout the day, causing various bits of mischief along the way. The creature is very affectionate, and most of its mischief is simply meant to get the attention of the main character, who despite everything, can't stay mad at the little guy for long. At the end of the day, the two unwind together and eventually collapse for a well-deserved night's rest.
I want to give the viewer some sense of curiosity about the creature. What exactly is it? How does it and the main character know each other? I want it to feel like these two characters have known each other for quite some time, like we're peeking in on a very deep friendship. I also want to try to make the creature feel more like a trickster figure rather than a malicious one--it doesn't mean any harm, it's just bored and more than a little impulsive (like most cats and """cats"""). I'm considering having a voice-over "narration" from the main character describe the day to potentially add some more nuance to the piece, but I haven't fully decided on it.
As for the design of the creature itself, I'm drawing inspiration from a character design I was gifted a few years ago by @barneykinnie on Discord, which I'll show below. Even though the character design is humanoid and I'm mostly going to be using cat silhouettes and abstract blob creature shapes for this project, it still captures the essence of the goopy, flowy, malleable feeling I want to go for, as well as a general color palette for me to use for the creature's eyes and accents.
I'm aware that this idea doesn't exactly fit the prompt of a dream or being transported to another world. I'm hoping to fit it under the category of "hallucination (but not really)": if I can get some friends to be extras in the short, I'd like to potentially establish that only the main character can actually see the creature, even if it can have tangible effects on the real world. I may even add a tidbit that everyone has such a creature, just because I think that could be a fun piece of world building.
Overall, I'm very excited about this project idea, even if it's likely going to be a ton of work. I've done my best to prioritize scenes in such a way where if I have to cut something to meet deadlines, I can. Fingers crossed, that won't be necessary. I'll now include my storyboard below (warning for awful stick figure sketches lol):
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