I started working on this project in October of last year(2021) Animation Dingle, a festival in County Kerry were hosting a competition for students to pitch and create stings for t heir festival. I was quite excited about this, i’ve been attending the festival for he past five years and couldn’t miss an opportunity to participate in it and my friends were entering the competition as well.

The festival required you to pitch a concept for a sting to be between 20-60 seconds, to include storyboards, an animatic, character designs, which would be due for October 29th.

I went brainstorming and came up with a little story about some kid eating chips on the dingle pier and a big monster rises, scary, but then the monster is An Phiast the festival’s mascot and all he wants is a few chips. I felt this would be short and sweet and something within my abilities of making.

I researched how to make a short animation and looked up a production pipeline to aid me in putting a schedule in place –

This is the pitch I sent – Sting pitch

These are my storyboards – Sting Storyboards

The boy character is called George… based off Teddy boy George Harrison!

The animatic required me to include sounds, I downloaded some files from a BBC archive of Beavers and Seagulls and topped them in which actually created an atmosphere- https://youtu.be/4ugBLGfXMG4

My sting was selected by the festival who sent the following email.

I was quite excited and drew a poster(I needed to get familiar with photoshop)..

.. but then realised this may be a bigger project than I thought, so I sought out the help of James Cunningham(which I really appreciate his help) to do some animation. He animated the first shot and I drew the key poses for it.  It would be 2d animation, there were many softwares to choose from, I looked through the pros and cons of them and messaged my tutors for advice. I was recommended to use After Effects and Toon Boom harmony, I picked Toon Boom as I  felt I wanted to draw out frame by frame animation instead of rigging it which I would use After Effects for.

I watched hours of videos, I found this series on youtube helpful –

I followed the animator’s survival kit by Richard Williams when it came to the animation. I animated on 2’s , with 24 frames per second. I followed the same guidelines he had in place for doing a simple walk cycle, the same thing applies to everything. You keyframe, draw the main extreme poses, test those out and  then draw the in-betweens, like this –

I made recorded some weird noises for the monster burping and did the rough animation-

It was difficult figuring out how to draw the burp, it’s something that’s very exaggerated in animation compared to real life. I looked up some cartoons as reference and this clip(1:50) from Scooby Doo was helpful, it’s how the lines are wobbly –

I looked up several poses of people eating something from a container to help get the exact proportions.

I drew and coloured some simple backgrounds as-well.

I cleaned up the animation and luckily could colour most of it with the paint bucket tool.

I edited it all together in premiere pro, I also recorded an original guitar jingle too that I included.

This is the scene in the sting I animated https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aZT1AET8quXy_GtpTUeERI1LJ9VKfQob/view?usp=sharing

Here is the full short –

I am happy with how the sting turned out, it was very satisfying watching the characters come to life when I drew each frame. It is not perfect though, as upon each rewatch I notice a new mistake, but that’s ok, this was a great learning experience, I actually got to make an animation! It was fun seeing a snippet show up in the awards show where they called out the name of the short ‘Chips’ ‘Ulster University’, I didn’t win best sting but it was all still very exciting.