To begin my FMP I decided to create a mood board and a mind map. This helps me to focus onto the ideas that will work the best, while thinking about my interests in life, what might be interesting for other people to see, what type of animation style and skills I would like to learn more and improve. I was introduced into documentary making called Pecha Kucha and this helped me to think carefully about the techniques and style for my FMP. 

My main idea was about rescue dogs.  So I developed a mind map and mood board by adding text boxes and photos of different animal rescue centres and what animals they rescue. 

I also considered a documentary to talk about the many different countries that I used to live in and talk about what the weather was like and how I improved my skills as I got older. However I decided that the rescue dog documentary would give me more options to use animation and I think it'll be a good worth while project to promote getting a rescue dog instead of buying a puppy.

The reason why I chose to add an animated dog onto my documentary because I thought about why do I like seeing animation and I like learning things when the documentary is animated. I find it easier to remember the information. So I looked up on Google to research if this was happening for other people. The websites said that  learned from a few websites that.  It can be cost effective because I don't need to rely on other people. Normally to produce a documentary, I would need a crew like a camera man, equipment and participance which can be time consuming and costly. Instead, with animation I can do the work by myself by using a software that uses animation and punctuation. By using animation, it can stand out from the rest of the documentary films, so I can use my creativity in a better way and I think get my message across so the viewers will focus more on the information on the documentary and will retain this information for longer. I can create a character which will be memorable to deliver the information and these characters will be relevant no matter how much time will pass. This is because the character is not bound by fashion, interior decoration or any other time signifiers. 

While I was working on my FMP, I decided to create an animated dog character to narrate and talk about why rescue dogs are important and why we take care of them. My first idea for my dog character, I was thinking of using a 3D model of a dog and make it in the same design style as a children  3D animated show called Paw Patrol. However I realize that creating a dog character on a 3D software would take a long time, so I was thinking of recolouring an existing model of a dog. My second idea for my dog character, I was thinking of making a 2D character of a dog, but it walks on two legs and make it in the same style as an Australian 2D Children's show, Bluey. 

Design of Character:

I decided to create some designs for how my character would look in my documentary. I want my animated dog character to be a likable funny character and I like how this design looks like that . My first design was based on Lucky from Bluey, but this character walks on two legs and I wanted my character to be more realistic in movement, so my dog will walk on four legs instead of two. My second design dog has four legs and I changed the colours so my dog is chocolate brown and has a collar so he's more realistic. I was also having trouble coming up with a name for character but now I decided to call him, Buddy because it sounded friendly and Buddy sounds like my friend for life.

Image below: I created a little animated scene of my dog character walking and moving on Adobe Animate. I first drew my character free hand on Paint.NET with the line tool, next I coloured him in using the paint bucket, then I converted him into a PNG file on Photoshop so that the white background around him won't appear on Adobe Animate. I also redesigned his legs on Photoshop so that when I animate his legs on Adobe Animate, you can see them moving one by one. When I imported him into Adobe Animate I had to rig him next and my tutor taught me how to use the pin point tool on Adobe Animate and that made him animated more quickly. I was trying to make my character move more realistically and I found a reference sheet on how to make my character walk. https://static.vecteezy.com/system/resources/previews/000/104/249/original/free-walk-cycle-vector.png 

I decided to add in some facial movement for my dog as he is host on my documentary and needs to be talking to the audience so I designed him with a mouth and make his eye and eyebrows move. I drew a mouth on Paint.NET and I made some more so that they'll do different things and I added the mouth on the dog and I needed to change it so the mouth movement fitted the words otherwise it would look out of sync. Now I have to make the mouths as PNG files so that they will appear in Adobe Animate. Unfortunately, after I did import the mouth expressions into Adobe Animate, there were a few things I needed to do with the mouths. First of all, I needed to label the mouths with different letters, there was some white backgrounds on the mouth and I converted them as PNGs at home, but I did learn a new thing on Adobe Animate by using the eraser tool and it worked.

I began to think about the opening shot for my documentary and after considered some different design ideas. I added the main title in 3D bold text, a subtitle on the bottom and a bone background (Because dogs like bones). I used the colour to make it stand out and to make it easier to read. I created poster on Paint.NET, the text is from Publisher, the text on the bottom was from Paint.NET and the background is from here: https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwallpapercave.com%2Fdog-bones-wallpapers&psig=AOvVaw20EDlRXmjAfyGz12dONA_i&ust=1683200514486000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CBIQjhxqFwoTCKDO39iI2f4CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAI 

I began to think about what I wanted to say in the documentary and the script for my dog character Buddy. I wanted the feel of the narration to be light hearted and easy to follow. I began a first draft of the script and seeing how it would match with the still visuals that I wanted to include in the documentary. the final script is slightly different because I didn't add Buddy in some of the real life scenes and I had to take out some scenes in the script. It was hard to combine the script, the visual and the timing right in the editing. 

Images to use in my dog documentary, also knows as background images.