Crow And Pitcher Storyboard

Ok, here's my rough storyboard.
1. The animation begins with an establishing shot of a tumbler on a bookshelf.
2. The camera rocks backward and forward zooming in and out of the tumbler.
3. The camera then rotates around showing the dippy bird crow drinking.
4. Zooming in, the water level begins to drop as the bird drinks.
5. Eventually, the water level is too low to drink and the crow becomes annoyed.
6. In sheer frustration, the crow throws his head back bashing the bookshelf above.
7. Marbles on the shelf above, become dislodged and fall ending up rolling past the crows feet.
8. The crow angrily picks up a marble and throws it against a book, it bounces back and splashes into the tumbler raising the water llevel slightly. Seeing this, the crow has an idea and picks up some more of the marbles and drops them in too. Eventually he can drink again :o)

Crow and pitcher mood board

The dippy bird/crow character I'm hoping to use in my fable is fairly inanimate, I'm going to have to look to the facial expressions to engage the viewer.
To that end, I'm drawing on inspiration from Pixar characters that show a wide range of emotion from eye and eyebrow shapes.
Although the story calls for a water pitcher which are usually crafted from pottery, I'll need to show the water level rising so I may go with a tumbler instead.

Researching the Fables....

To get a better feel for how the fables could be translated for children I bought a copy of the old school Ladybird book 'A First Book Of Aesops Fables' published in 1974 from amazon.co.uk Even though the book's a little tatty, it features some cool illustrations.



Nice crow illustration with plenty of character...



The text is fairly true to the original fables and hasn't been dumbed down at all.

I'll now look at books aimed at modern children and see how they differ at all. Are the illustrations more currently relevant?

Developing ideas..

Taking a 1970's style Dippy Bird bought from Ebay as a study, I took some of the details and created a character that's a combination of a dippy bird and a crow. I've sketched on seperate eyebrows as I'm hoping to model it in a simailar way allowing the face to have various expressions.
I want to avoid speech so the animation can be understood in any language but I may add some sound effects at a later date.