Process:

The process I took in making this piece of animation was, finding the Idea for what the story should be, the way I did this was, mainly "I want to have a fight scene, but not for the sake of having a fight scene, I want it to have a story behind it" this took me a bit of time to figure out, for instance, why are they fighting? Who are they? Where are they? What are they using? These points will affect how the animation will play out and how they will move.

How I came up with the demon, child and Slayer, was firstly thinking, if I have a third companion or character, this should help me identify where the plot will go, so adding the child made the story become more appropriate, for instance if it was just the Slayer and the Demon, the only reason they would fight is because its the slayers "Job" so adding the child created a drive for the Slayer to want to fight the Demon more, but with all good story telling there is always a certain twist or some surprise to it, and having it as "The Child summoned the Demon and they then become friends and travel together" would allow this "Twist" to work, and to add to it, "The Demon is a powerful being" also creates the feeling of what is this child really? Which means the story could be added upon if I was to ever continue it, which I would love to. The only thing this story also needs is a "Driving statement/Question" and Cultural perspective, so having the Child and Demon as friends allowed me to easily identify these, "Don't judge a book by its cover" , there would have been a good part of the larger animation that would have really shown this, but guess it wont be shown for some time.

So now that I have the story laid out, now I just need to get concepts of characters and environments to then get a good start on this animation, the way I did this was I used art station to help look at character concepts and designs, environments and also for art style assistance, there was a lot to choose from, but I wanted the characters to have a cartoony, simple style so it wouldn't be too hard to animate (spoiler, it ended up being a little more difficult than I thought), and with the assistance of these references I was able to create the concepts that I have.

After doing the concepts I then had to figure out how the animation was going to be done and laid out, so straight into story boarding I went, the original story board I had come up with was just way too long, it would have end up being about 3 minutes at probably the least, and there was no one I would have been able to do that in the time frame I had, so scaling down was the next thing I had done, after the scaling was done, it ended up being about 30 seconds, so that would be manageable, and with that done it was time to get an animatic done.

So getting the animatic done was actually really simple and somewhat quick, easy poses to read, being able to identify the way things were meant to move and the where, but I came into a snag, my timing was a little iffy, there were parts that seemed to fast, so I had to slow things down and make sure that it was pleasing to the eyes, and this took me a few tries, but managed to get it in the end.

Now it's time to animate, so the first thing I ended up animating was the magic ball that the child fires, this was in the middle of the animation so if scaling down needed to happen it would be in a generally safe area to keep in, and yes scaling down did happen multiple times, I ended up just having to animate the middle section where the stand off happens and the magic ball is fired, so I wasn't able to animate the actual fighting, which I was a little disappointing but I'm glad I actually have some thing to show though.

Now that the animating was done, it is just getting the audio in, and thanks to the awesome crew that worked with me, I had some really cool audio and music to attach to this project, and with out the audio I don't think it would be as cool as it is with it, it really adds to the feeling of the animation, I know I wasn't able to produce the full animation we were all hoping for, but I hope I can add to this in the future to feature the full sound track they have made. Thanks guys