Tales of The Witnesses
Episodic Animation
Synopsis
Tales of The Witnesses takes place in the roaring 20s in New York, where one promising inventor Warren Darwin was murdered by the bullet of one of five suspects. Grace Darwin (the wife), Richmond Darwin (the brother), Geovani (the investor), Bertha (the sister-in-law), and Peyton (the business partner) are now put under investigation, where they have to unfold their intricate relationships and reveal dark secrets in a five-minute interview.
*Our pilot is currently being submitted for festival screening so we aren't allowed to publish it :( thank you for your understanding
About the project
As fans of both brain teaser activities and animation, we conceptualized Tales of the Witnesses, a five-episode detective fiction. In each episode, we will listen to one of the suspects recounting the series of events of the night of the murder, based on their POV. From there, the viewer will find clues to solve the final mystery.
Ultimately, our goal with this show is to invite people with an interest in storytelling through animation and puzzle-solving to start their own investigation and share their speculation about who is the killer, based on the clues.
Character Design
For each character, we wanted them to have a clear shape and color theme that reflected the characters' personalities. We also navigated towards the slim-built character designs that were popular in 1920’s fashion magazines and incorporate the distinctive personalities of each character into the design.
Development Work
Character Sketches
Below are the early version of our characters. You can see the applications of shapes and several experimental anatomy forms in these versions.
Background Concept Art
Here are some concept art for our backgrounds, characterized by monochromatic colors, black lines to define the furniture shapes with exaggerated perspective. These concept arts were made for the pilot episode which follows the perspective of Grace, whose color theme is yellow, therefore all the assets are tinted to her color theme, and the following episodes will be tinted to the other characters' color theme.
Animatics
Animatic 1
This is the first version of our animatic, based on the pilot script. In this first animatic, we can visualize the main scenes and motions of the characters, synced to the voice audio.
Animatic 2
This is the second version of our animatic. We have added some fully animated scenes and updated the animatic according to changes of the script and new audio.
Animatic 3
This is the third version of our animatic. In this version, the episode is fully animated and is used as the reference for the next stage, which is the coloring and clean up.
