ANIMATION PRINCIPLES - MOODBOARD AND RESOURCE GATHERING

Before doing any actual animation, I decided to make a Powerpoint to document the things I needed prepped. This included:

• A Moodboard
• Colour schemes
• Colour tests
• Sketches

I started with the moodboard, which included the Infinity Gauntlet and the various Infinity Stones in different scenarios from different movie appearances across the series.

(Every appearance of the Infinity Stones in the MCU, pre-Infinity War - credit: Marvel Studios)

Even though I was settling with the Eye of Agamotto, I thought I'd include all of them. In the films, all six Infinity Stones were revealed over the course of 7 years. In order, they are:

• Space Stone - 2011 (Captain America: The First Avenger, The Avengers, Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War - encased in the Tesseract, kept in Odin's Vault)
• Mind Stone - 2012 (The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War - encased in Loki's Sceptre, moved to Vision's forehead)
• Reality Stone - 2013 (Thor: The Dark World, Avengers: Infinity War - encased in the Aether, with The Collector on Knowhere)
• Power Stone - 2014 (Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Infinity War - encased in the Orb, with the Nova Corps. on Xandar)
• Time Stone - 2016 (Doctor Strange, Avengers: Infinity War - encased in the Eye of Agamotto, with Doctor Strange at the Sanctum Sanctorum)
• Soul Stone - 2018 (Avengers: Infinity War - kept on Vormir, guarded by Red Skull)

The Eye of Agamotto was definitely the best choice between all six stones, due to a combination of the casing itself and how interesting it looks. As it stood before Infinity War, the only other encased stones were the Reality, Space and Power stones. But their casings were basic 3D shapes, with nothing interesting to look at with them. The other two stones, Mind and Soul, were stored in a character's head and a planet respectively, which I couldn't really do. Thus, the Time Stone, and the Eye of Agamotto casing, won out.

When deciding on potential colour schemes to use, we used the Adobe Colour website to experiment and test different combinations. The website lets users use a wheel to create their own colour palette.

I made two main colour schemes while testing what would look good; one which focused more on colour reusage based around the stones themselves, and one that focused more on the Gauntlet itself. In the end, I put opted for colour scheme 2, after seeing it work better in a Photoshop trial of the original Infinity Gauntlet comic cover. 

The final thing I decided to document was the assets I needed to create. After trying out the tools to create shapes in After Effects, I elected that it wasn't quite right for me. I think that making them in a separate Adobe program, like Illustrator or Photoshop, would be best. For each prop, I split them into their core pieces. For the Infinity Gauntlet, they were:

• Fingers - The fingers of the gauntlet
• Hand plate - The plate of the Gauntlet that houses the stones
• Thumb - Similar in function to the fingers, but somewhat different in shape
• Cuff - Where you put your arm into

And for the Eye of Agamotto, they were:

• Time Stone - A green oval
• Main casing - The base of the entire Eye
• Doctor Strange emblem - A cross hatch design associated with the Doctor Strange character

All my visual documentation can be seen in the Powerpoint below.