WIP 11 seconds club

I've been working on the block sequience of the 11 seconds club dialog, I had a mix up with ideas and tried a few different poses for different actions the characters Mrs Crawley and the profession could perform.

 Outline:The Mrs Crawley is trying to invent the time machine and it seems to be working this time, so she begins really excited on high tension. She goes from happy to sad when she relises shes failed again, but this time the Professor gives up and leaves the time machine.

I wanted to make mrs Crawley looks alot smaller than the professor, so I kept her the body posture quite close together and i''ve planned to keep her timing a little snappy and  in high tension to reflect personality. I think her character will be easy to empathise as we all been in this kind of situation where you try your hardest but still don't succeed. The professor's personality is much more confident, she is a powerful character so her gestures are alot more relaxed, stood upstraight and open.

I used the reference of Rachael & Rachael's performance to plan out the staging of the animation, I think I went a little overbaord with the idea so I have to make sure the concept (the time machine) is clear to the audience but doesnt overpower the animation. To do this i picked out ideas from old classics such as "Back to the future" and "H.G wells The Time machine",  we also have the Tardis, Stargate and more recently the hot tub time machine (thanks to Rachaels post). after generating ideas I made a few sketches and i came up with these final designs for the staging of the characters and the enviroment:

The light grey shaded shapes are the two characters
Darker shades are clocks
Square blocks in the background are machinery, buttons,

Final idea:

Two characters are stood side by side with a large clock in the middle Other blocks of machinery can be seen side by side.

   

Here I'm using the clock almost as a character for the time machine. I think positioning the characters like this shows most clearly to the audience the three most important elements of the animation, Mrs Crawley (right) The Professor (left) and the clock, (middle). The clock takes up the most area so it should be static and become part of the background during the performance of the two characters.