Story line

Story line 1

Pumpkins are not the most lovable of vegetables, but to this one man, it is the love of his life. But to his wife, the pumpkin he planted and grew would be the perfect Jack-O-Lantern for this halloween.
Now he must find a way to stop his once loyal wife, hell bent on owning the best halloween decoration, from carving his perfect pumpkin.

Story line 2

A young boy and his older brother were two thieves on a cruise ship when a storm hit the ship and they were washed up onto an awkward large rock that had no vegetation or access to fishing. All they had between them was a small and a large bag of food. The eldest brother shared out the food giving his youngest brother the small bag saying as he was the smallest, he should receive the smallest bag. The younger brother was furious, snatched the bag and refused to sit with his sibling. Many days pass and the younger brother was beginning to starve for he had the smaller half, so he decided to go to the other side and steal some of his brothers food, kill him for it if he had too. But when he got there he saw his brothers bag was still full and in opening it found it was full of gold and jewel of which they robbed and that he had not had any share of food but had eaten his leg instead.

Story line 3

Two pirates are swept onto opposite ends of a small desert island. One has a treasure map of the island, the other has a loaded gun. The pirate with the map immediately starts to hunt for treasure and soon discovers that it is on top of a very steep sided hill. Eager to claim his prize, he begins to climb the hill. He reaches the top just enough to peer over the lip, and sure enough, there is the treasure chests. Unable to contain his excitement, he slips and falls into an open chest at the foot of the hill. He vows to guard the treasure to make sure no one else claims it. Some time later, the pirate with the gun arrives at the hill and sees his friend. He asks what he is doing there and inside a chest, so the other explains. He makes an agreement with the other to share the treasure, hands over his gun, and climbs the hill. He reaches the top, drags one of the chests to the edge of the hill, opens it and looks inside. To his horror, there is nothing inside. He opens all the other chests, and they are all empty. He sees his friend who is watching in nervous anticipation from the bottom of the hill. Looking down, he yells to his friend that he is not going to let him have the treasure and they should live together without it, and climbs down. Furiously, the pirate in the box pulls the gun on the other, and shoots him. At that moment, the chest on the edge of the hill falls down revealing that it was empty all along. The he realized that his friend knew that upon discovering the chests were empty would have broken his heart, and lied to him to protect his feelings, and now he is stuck on the island alone.

Old Toy Design Inspirations

Barry Purves

Tara Mcpherson

Quentin Blake

I also decided to look at Quentin Blake's illustrations, the scratchy uneven angular characters create a similar kind of feel to Tim Burton's style of drawing for his character designs.
These types of illustrations are the kind of style I want to use as reference for my work, to create a kind of dark surrealist atmospheric kind of animation.

Tim Burton on Animation

With Tim Burtons unique surrealist style his characters are preferred to be tall, thin with small feet, which creates a challenge when it comes to making the puppets and expecting them to perform the actions in the script, especially since balance is one of the main difficulties of the character design.
Burton's stylised puppets are uncomfortably sharp and angular, best stand out in a specific light with lots of atmospheric shadow making his work look dark but usually well supported by voice actors and soundtrack.
Even his live actions film such as Beetle Juice and Edward Scissor Hands were filmed in the same atmospheric grotesque other worldly way.
A Nightmare Before Christmas character models were done by the finest animators in the world that brought the creepy characters eerily to life on an elaborate sets with grotesque anthropomorphic buildings, crumbling masonry, rusting railings and dank cobbled streets, all which were textured to have the look of the scratchy cross-hatched, pen work found in Tim Burtons original drawings.
With the triumph of model making and animation especially with the gracefully thin Jack Skeleton that James and the Giant Peach was unable to capture the same imagination as Tim Burton's darkly disturbing Nightmare.

Test

These are a few test I did so i can analysis and them and see how I can develop them.