Odd Cat Animation: The Mystery of Edwin Drood

So this is the title sequence I created fr the BBC's 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' Which was first broadcast on the 10th of Jan at 9PM on BBC Two and BBC HD.

The main Idea for it was to convey a journey form London, to a place called Cloisterham in the countryside. Below are some of the first concept for the sequence, as it started out much more 'inky' with blocks of colour to show what was countryside and what was London.

There was much more detail on the buildings as they were drawn in ink, and the coloured ink seeped and spread as the camera tracked across the paper. But the problem with this graphic style was that the camera had to track much slower to give the ink time to draw in the detail and the colour, which heavily reduced the distance that felt travelled- Cloisterham had to feel very far form London.

The lines had to be much more simple- had to feel as though they were racing over a distance. So eventually, they became more and more simple, until all we had were streaks of ink.

We also went back to looking at Victorian ink drawings- we needed to go into detail at either end of the sequence so it was clear that we started in London, and ended in Cloisterham. The camera would have to track slowly/ pause over these drawings to give them time to develop.

One of the main problems we had was the camera movement. The camera doesn't just track from Left to Right, it also tracks back from London, and then tracks into Cloisterham. Theoretically simple, but because this project was fully digital- it meant that we would have to use a plate that quite a lot bigger than HD (@_@) ... and we had quite a few problems getting any computer to cope with it.
In the end, I made a low res plate and animated the camera move over it for reference.

The Victorian Drawings are animated Backwards- Drawn on several layers, I erased them bit by bit per frame. The main Ink lines are animated Frame by frame by duplicating the previous frame, moving it into position, (using the low res reference) and drawing the ink bleeding further.

The main two programmes used for this were Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe After Effects.

Below are some of the final storyboards of the animation, though the zoom, position of the title card and what was cut to at the end were changed during the anamatic stage.