Samuel Kitchen was asked to create a 30+ second animation about drug awareness for a young teen audience. He decided on a frame-by-frame, stop motion style animation to give it a comic-like feel. The animation would follow a 1940s noir-inspired detective investigating the death of a young teen from a drug overdose, tracking down those responsible for producing the drugs. The animation's soundtrack, character design, title card, and animation style were all chosen to match the 1940s noir detective theme.

1. Design for Final
Animation
By Samuel Kitchen

2. Product Design
We were asked to create a 30+ second animation about drug awareness. I had
many different and interesting ideas for how I was going to go about making it.
First off was deciding what type of animation I wanted to do, whether it was
smooth animation or not. I decided to go with a frame by frame, almost stop
motion style animation to give the sense of a sort of comic, this was to help
appeal to a young teen audience as they would be interested in graphic novel
comics.
I then decided on a theme, as it was associated with drugs, I decided to link
it to crime and detective route as that interests me. This got me thinking about
the style and setting, so I decided upon a 1940’s noir inspired setting but with a
modern twist. I was going to revolve my plot around a detective looking into a
death of a young teen, who overdosed on drugs and how he tracks down the
people responsible for the production of said drugs.

3. This is a brief storyboard for the animation, it includes
all the scenes that will appear in the actual one, the
description tells everything that will happen in that
specific scene, some parts, such as the police officer,
have been cut from the final animation as they weren't
needed or didn’t work with the animation’s story all
together.

4. Soundtrack of Animation
I am using Minor 9th from the L.A. Noire soundtrack
(Link- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H-gpgL17F4)
to create my backing track. The reason for this is that
my animation is based off a noire style, detective movie,
so I thought it was fitting to add a soundtrack that
reflects this style.

5. Design for Character
The design for the main character is based on a cliché 1940's, noir detective. This
is because it fits in with the theme and style of the overall animation. I also
chose this because detective are my favourite type of characters from TV series
and I’ve always wanted to create an animation involving one, so I saw this as a
chance to combine the two.

6. Title Card
At the beginning of my animation, a title card will appear showing the name
of the feature. I took the inspiration for this from ‘Batman: The Animated
Series’, the show is based in the 1940’s and starts each episode off with a
card, so I thought it would be a good idea to incorporate one into my project.

7. Style of Animation
The style of my animation is inspired by the game ‘Ghost Trick’. It is a
detective game in which you solve crimes by possessing objects and
assessing the scene. The cutscenes consist of a character’s drawn
portrait on one side of the screen while text appears in a box below. I
wanted to incorporate this style into my animation as it would tailor
towards the teenage audience as using parts a lot like popular video
games would entice them into watching and paying attention to the
animation.

8. FINAL ANIMATION