Why Animators Need Mood Boards

Mood Board for "Animal Lover" 

Mood Boards are an important part of the process of making an animated film.

Mood Boards, such as the one on the left for the award-winning short film "Animal Lover", allow the director and art director to get a feel for what a film will look like, long before the animation and lighting is complete.

Start with Research

Mood Boards are essentially a research project, at this stage you are not creating original artwork, just finding useful references of what sort of visual style and influences will inform the look of the film.

award-winning short film "Animal Lover"

PR5001 - Studio Project

Our second year animation undergraduates tackle Studio Project Module PR5001, where students collaborate to work together on group projects.

Module PR5001 is a film-making module, the culmination of the second year of study at Escape Studios.

In this module students work together in teams, and the skills involved are just as much about film-making as they are about animation.

Who makes Mood Boards?
Mood Boards are an important part of the development of any short film. Mood Boards are usually put together by the art director or production designer, working with the director to establish a harmonious style and colour palette. A Mood Board is a kind of digital collage, pulling together inspiring images that can be used to create original artwork.

Animal Lover
Our 2nd year undergraduate animators collaborated with one of our MA Storyboarding students, Anastasia Gurova, to create the short film "Animal Lover". It's a short story, just under a minute long, based loosely on Anastasia's childhood experiences growing up in Russia.

Animal Lover from Priya Shah on Vimeo.

Russian Landscapes
To give the film a Russian flavour, Anastasia put together mood boards of Russian landscapes and costume to keep the story rooted in a particular time and place. The Russian steppe is flat, with a low horizon and few small hills.

Landscape Mood Board
On the right you can see some of Anastasia's Russian landscape reference images. Important choices have to be made - where are we? A village? A hamlet? What time of day is it? What will dominate the colour palette - warm colours or cool colours?

Costume Mood Board
Anastasia also prepared a reference board to help with the clothing and costume design for the women in the story.

Anastasia Gurova

1990s Russia
Country people in the 1990s in rural Russia didn't dress fashionably; their appearance was not a priority as they had hard lives and had to work the soil.  The women dressed in long skirts mostly, often in hand-made textiles; with no jeans or trousers.

Children would be randomly dressed, usually in hand-me-down clothes, and a bit dirty from playing outside.

Mood Board - The First Step
Anastasia's work has paid off because the team now has a clear guide for the look and feel of the film. This informs the costumes, the landscapes, the character design, and the lighting of the film.  This groundwork is helping to give the film a special flavour, based as it is on Anastasia's own personal story. This is a tale that only she can tell - because it is about her own life experiences.

Colour Script

Animal Lover

After the mood board comes the colour script, showing the visual style of each shot in the movie. To find out more, see Why Animators Need Colour Scripts.

Film-Making Resources
For more Film-making resources at the Escape Studios Animation Blog, see below:

• Why Animators Need Colour Scripts
• Managing Group Projects
• Why Animators Must Wreck Their Rigs
• Test Your Render Pipeline Early and Often
• How to Record Voice-Overs
• What are CBBs? (Could be Better)
• How to Create the Perfect One-Sheet Movie Poster (and why you need one)
• Getting Listed at IMDB

The Escape Studios Animation Blog offers a personal view on the art of animation and visual effects. To apply for our new BA/MArt  follow this link.