Visual approach

I plan to animate the film in two dimensions in a black and-white comic strip style of line art, with colours rendered as tonal qualities (a good comparison would be the webcomic Octopus Pie by Meredith Gran). 

A big influence on my approach to visual storytelling is comic artist and theorist Scott McCloud, whose book Understanding Comics and 1980s comic book series Zot! get across a lot with black-and-white line art, with little to no gray or dot-shading. (He was one of the first prominent comic artists in the Western world to be influenced by Japanese manga).

The character design is cartoonish, influenced by the likes of Jim Davis (Garfield), John Kricfalusi (Ren & Stimpy), The Simpsons and classic Warner Brothers animation.

I plan to make my best effort to employ a heavily fluid and smooth style of animation, influenced by Warner Brothers and Richard Williams with a strong sense of timing.

Though most of the film will be hand-drawn (digitally, that is), I plan to animate buses and possibly some background elements by modeling and animating them in 3D and then tracing over them with drawings. I plan on making the designs of Reid and Gemma’s buses (as well as street signage outside) slightly different from each other, as a way of subtly foreshadowing the reveal that they are actually in separate cities.