Log line：This is a story that takes place in a witch’s restaurant, and it tells about the soul swap between the witch’s cat and the chef on TV.
Synopsis：A witch who owns a restaurant in order to make delicious food that can attract customers, while experimenting with the developing magic soup dishes, intently watching the chef on TV award, resulting in her failed works accidentally drunk by her pet cat, the cat and the chef on TV soul exchange. The witch and the Chef Cat try different soup recipes in order to find a way to exchange souls back, and in the end, when the witch and the Chef Cat is arguing, the Chef Cat accidentally drops into the soup pot with the correct ingredient bottle, allowing the souls to exchange back.
Target Audience : Child and teenagers
Storyboard
Animatic
animatic version 1
animatic version 2
Deleted shots
animatic most updated version
Character design
Cat design
The cat is a character we added later on, it is inspired by the stone lion, which means to protect the owner’s peace, so a stone lion is placed at the entrance of Chinese buildings for decoration. So initially it was placed in the doorway. In our story, our main character is a witch with magic power, and when we mention witches we always feel mysterious and weird. Yourong designed a one-eyed black cat. But she could not make up her mind to use it or not. But after talking to the group, we thought it was an interesting shape so we kept the design.
The design of all characters were originally Sena’s work, but due to time issue, I had designed the cat.
About Chef and Witch
At the beginning, our characters were centered around a chef and a witch, but later on the story changed to a witch and a cat. Considering the fact that we need to put them into the animation later on, we tried to simplify the witch and define the overall style of the witch based on the characters drawn by sena, while keeping the overall appearance of the witch the same. At the beginning of the change, Yourong considered four aspects, characterization, audience, story type and personal style of the members. She made some adjustments to the face of the witch, but later chose to use the original face because we’re working on an anime for children and teenagers, and it doesn’t look as aggressive as it is sinister, and it fits the character of the witch in our story better. The group mates were able to draw this type of face, so she chose not to change it.
The clothing of the witch was a difficult, Yourong wanted it to be different from her own style and easier for us to draw. At the same time, she wanted to keep the characteristic of the dress, and to be able to see that she was made up of more clearly defined shapes.
Chef design
designed by Sena
designed by me
Witch design
Designed by Yourong