Rikki Tikki Tavi - Concept Animation

I've been wanting to adapt Rudyard Kiplings amazing short story from the Jungle Book, Rikki Tikki Tavi. I quickly realized it would be really difficult to do it live action. So as I started looking into options for animation I kept having this vision of a completely monochromatic visual component that makes the foreground and the background blend.

At about this same time, I signed up for an animation practicum course here at BYU, taught by Ryan Woodward and Kelly Loosli. The class focuses on experimenting with animation (the medium and the content). So this is the result of my first dabblings in Flash animation.

2 experimental components that I was after: First, in making the process simpler and more unique, I was interested in seeing how many lines I "didn't" have to include. Thus my characters body parts are not connected but individual shapes moving together and our mind almost automatically fills in the blanks.

The second experimental component, is that I animated the whole thing with a mouse. For those not too familiar with Flash, animators use a tablet and a stylus that lets them "draw" by hand, on the computer. Its pretty cool stuff. But I chose to not go that route and instead designed my shapes like a graphic designer would, using Adobe Illustrator and bringing the shapes into Flash to animate them. I think the result was a sharp edged, sort of "toy-like" result with the movements and shapes.