HARDY'S WESSEX

Project: Group

Type: Animation

Software: Illustrator, After Effects

Brief: A live project set by Wessex Museum in 2022 to create a short animation based off the themes of love and war, and the Thomas Hardy’s book ‘Trumpet Major’. They wanted to appeal to a younger audience without isolating their current audience of seniors, and families. The novel centres around Anne Garland and three men who are attempting to win her love and affections in the middle of the Napoleon war.

Solution

We decided to tell the story of the Trumpet Major with a modern twist by portraying the story through a dating app, similar to Tinder to appeal to the young adult audience. We also brought in ‘olden day’ elements to appeal to the older audience as well, such as mimicking black and white film, using some historically accurate language and clothing, and using a quill for the 'typing' emote.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Planning

When we had chosen the concept of our video, we made several storyboards, making iterations before we decided on the final visual storyline, which can be seen on this webpage. Once deliberating on illustration style, colour, voice actress, etc. we took the storyline and made it into an animatic, seen below. This allowed us to see the pacing of the animation and whether it was missing anything before we committed to animating it. From this we added a few more frames to create more variation, and we updated the men's costume to be historically accurate to the time period and characters in the book.