Naomi was the director and designer for this project. She came up with an initial idea based around a story about man-flu which was short and sweet, and we got stuck into the pre-production. Almost 2 months into production when we had a locked down animatic, with drawings in flash probably every 4 to 8 frames, and some scenes almost completely finished, we had a call from the NHS. While our project had been developing, the swine-flu pandemic had unfortunately also been developing, and the NHS didn’t feel that now was quite the right time to tell a story about manflu. So we had to start over, with one extra month added to our deadline time. Naomi’s story and animatic were probably one of the stranger casualties of swine flu. My work on modelling and rigging characters could fortunately be recycled. However, it meant coming up with a new story and boards in about 2 days!
I’ll try to post some pre-production work shortly. In the meantime here’s a family lineup done for the original pitch.