With our basic idea down, it was now time for my team to polish our idea a little more and have a more clear idea on what was going to be included in the animation. We had an upcoming presentation where we’d show our idea to our clients and receive some feedback, so we took the opportunity to come up with some rough designs and a clearer narrative for the story. Over a video call, we discussed what the content of our short film would be, what kids would learn from it and roughly who would do what.

We decided to drop the idea of presenting dogs through history and focus solely on the jobs they do and in which ways they help us out with our lives. We wrote this quick logline and synopsis to communicate what our idea was to our clients;

Our basic idea is to have a grandma read a story to her dog-crazy grandson, showing kids the many ways in which we rely on dogs. The animation will start with a boy in dog pyjamas excitedly waiting for his grandma to read him a story titled ‘dogs with jobs’, and will end with the boy happily sleeping. I feel this idea is a good one as children are familiar with the concept of learning things through a story book, which will immediately add some believability and familiarity to our animation for the young target audience, and the general message and story can be interpreted well even without dialogue (which we were advised not to use too much of, as the Horniman museum tends to be loud, and children understand actions better than they do words).

Here are some quick sketches of the dogs we thought would be the most entertaining to show to kids;

1. Dalmatian- police dog (Jahiem)
2. Labrador retriever- blind service dog (Jahiem)
3. St. Bernard- snow rescue dog (Leonardo)
4. Alaskan husky- sled dog (Leonardo)
5. Laika- a dog who was sent to space (we won’t show the part where she burns to death) (Jahiem)
6. German shepherd- police dogs (Leonardo)
7. Akita Inu- therapy dog (Calix)

We tried choosing a range of dogs so that the content of our animation didn’t get stale, and we also opted for dogs who were easily recognisable either because of their unique features or uniforms/job outfits, so that children would be able to know what they were. We ideally would show each dog for about 5 seconds, taking up 35 seconds, with scenes of the grandma and boy at the beginning and end would take up the remaining time, making the animation 50 seconds in total.

With some refinement and rough sketches down, we were now ready to present our idea to the client and hear what they thought about it. With confidence in our idea and skills, I’m excited to hear what feedback we get and how we can improve on our idea.