Propercorn - Creating a concept

For this Propercorn brief we knew that we wanted something different, using inspiration from the research that we both conducted, we came up with an idea that incorporated a world of making popcorn. This world needed to be different and quirky, much like the Willy Wonka factory in Roald Dahl's works. Using this as a basis, I generated ideas in which most revolved around the use of gnome like characters, from this both myself and Alex came up with the idea of a mine like factory to create this popcorn with the flavours being crystals that the gnomes would mine. I started to generate sketches of a storyboard and possible narrative for the flavours of the popcorn. Immediately I knew that we would have to focus on one of the flavour productions as the animation would need to be over the duration for an ident, that was the original intention to produce for the brief. I felt that this would help us to focus on the imagery and how it can be aimed at that particular flavour with the premise of a series of idents that would be dedicated to the other flavours.

I wasn't entirely sure which flavour to focus on at first as there was so much choice with the products that Propercorn have, for example the coconut and vanilla flavour would be interesting to design for with the crystals and backgrounds that would relate to that flavour. I did however believe that the lightly sea salted flavour would possibly be the best choice through how even though the use of the seasoning is simple, it would help to generate innovative ideas to represent these elements.

I started to move on to a possible character design which I quickly sketched as a warm up before properly beginning my work. So far I realised that I was focusing too much on a normal figure, I knew that I needed to change my style to suit the gnome like creature that we wanted for the animation; my quick sketches looked more like children rather than small gnome creatures. In order to solve this problem I needed to draw stereotypical gnomes and then develop from there. I did however draw a robot to see how that would work but I felt that it made it seem as if the company were robotic themselves which was not a good message to present to the audience.