I'd set aside some time at the weekend to go out and take some location photos for my animation short. As it's set in Africa I had intended to make a trip there but the funding never materialised, so I was forced to take the shots locally. Ideally, to make these shots any way convincing, they would have been taken in sunny weather. Having researched the African grassland on the inter web, I would say there are some similarities in these photos, but sunshine would have helped. There were some sunny spells on saturday morning but I was unable to get away and from around lunchtime it poured rain for the rest of the day. Sunday morning started off the same, a few sunny spells in between showers. I set off to my chosen location just as one of these showers finished, expecting another sunny spell to follow. Naturally, being Ireland, this didn't happen and it stayed overcast and a storm even began. I took as many shots as I could, considering the weather, and headed back. Not surprisingly the sun reappeared five minutes into my journey home.

These images have most of what I was looking for. Small trees and bushes. Some long grass, not enough though, and some rocky terrain. There was some exposed rock face on part of the hill where I got these shots but I couldn't get close enough because there was cows there (after all my research into how dangerous water buffalo are, I was a bit weary of the cows).The image above is probably the nearest to what I imagined the setting would be for the animation. The grass and shrubs are a bit too green but it has the general layout i.e. flat mid and foreground with a background of shrubs / small trees providing cover and shelter from the sun.

A few shots of how my opening scene might look as it will be a low-angle shot, through the long grass, from Leroy's perspective.

I Photoshopped some of the images to get a feel for how they might look in the animation. I think I'll have to return there on a sunny day and re-shoot these backgrounds, but overall the location is fairly o.k. for what I'm trying to portray.

With regards the characters in this animation, water buffalo and lions, I wanted to get some shots of cows, cats and kittens.

I wanted to get a low-angle shot of a cows head, as thats how the buffalo would look in some of the animation shots, but I wasn't going to take any chances with real cows (they can be killers) so I downloaded some for reference.

I thought I'd be able to get some shots of kittens playing for reference material. One of our neighbours cats has kittens so that would have been an ideal opportunity, but it proved impossible to get them all to stay in the one space for more than a few seconds, let alone play together. I don't know how David Attenborough does it.