The group consisting of me, Tim and Jonathan, created a short film called Gold Fangs & Silver Bullets, a short about a man going on the hunt for a vampire in an old western town. The film was mostly in 3d, though I provided a lot of 2d assets such as background textures and concepts. My main duty for the animation was 2d animation, as the short features 2 fully 2d characters, the preacher and the bartender, with the preacher being the secondary protagonist.
At the end of year show, we showcase our work, both the final project and whatever else we have created in the courses we did in our years, through a portfolio, a showreel and various other means.
I designed 3 sketches that I think would’ve made for great posters. I did simple sketches in Krita and was going to finish them by drawing over them.
With the aesthetics of the poster, I looked at several spaghetti western posters. I made a variation of the first poster featuring Italian text for the title. I used Google Translate to turn the text into Italian so it probably didn’t translate correctly, but it looked good on the poster.
The first poster features a close of the vampire’s mouth with blood pouring out the bottom and a gold tooth reflecting the protagonist pointing a gun at him. This was my favorite of the ones that I sketched because I liked the composition, with the gold tooth being big and standing out from the rest of the elements of the image, as well as keeping in tone with the short.
The second one features the giant torso of the vampire in the background with 2 skeleton arms going out of the ground holding revolvers. The vampire has a gold fang and a silver bullet in place of a fang on the right. I was going for an Evil Dead style with this poster, with skeleton arms similar to the ones from the poster of the original movie.
The third one has the most generic composition with the protagonist as a giant head in the sky and the saloon in the foreground. I went with an early Universal/hammer horror style for this poster, with the bats coming out of the top of the saloon similar to a haunted house.
I think any of these would’ve made for a good poster, but due to time constraints and commitment to animating, Tim was the one who designed the poster instead. Sketching these did cause me to think more about the composition of my drawings and I had fun trying to convey the tone of the short through these sketches, leading me to think more about theming for extra material related to a project, i.e. Creating a poster for an animation, an art book featuring concept material.
Tim had 3d printed the characters from the short for the display, as well as printing out his poster, which was also used as the title card for the short. I thought it was cool that he did this as we already had a base for the characters, due to them being made in a 3d program so it already had all the faces and sides to the characters for the printer to take reference from. It was cool to see them actualized in this way and they added to the presentation of the display.
He had also printed an art book for the animation, featuring concept work from the making of the short. I had included my character design, background designs and concepts, as well as the concepts for the posters I had designed. They also included their own work on the short, with not just their drawn work such as backgrounds and concept art, but their 3d models too.
I put together a portfolio, through both my blog and in PowerPoint. I included a number of my stuff both digital and traditional, showing off my concept art, character designs I drew for my various assignments, animatics/storyboards, backgrounds, my 3d work and my animations, including my showreel. The slides that I inserted into the PowerPoint I feel features some of my best stuff and showcase my abilities, showing off my best work aesthetically, conceptually and my best animation.
I had edited together a showreel, which comprises of my work from 2018 to 2024, showcasing my animation skills, particularly in 2d, though it does include some 3d animation. It features bits of my previous animations as well as the shots I had animated from the final project. I had also included some animations I made outside of uni work, so I had a good number of animations I could include in the reel. The clips I included had the years that they were made and some info on some of the shots, like if I had referenced the movements from another clip. They also went well with the music that I chose for the video. I put in the animations that felt either had the best technical animation, the most unique presentations in terms of shot direction and storyboarding, or just to show off my older pre-digital program animations and comparing them to my more recent animations. I had animated a title card for the showreel, as well as an ending card that had continued from the last animation I included in the reel. The last shot in the reel was a shot from the final project where the preacher character jumps out of the way from a bullet in the bedroom doorway, so I did a small animation of the preacher landing flat on his face beside the credits. I included this as a fun way of finishing off the showreel, instead of just ending it abruptly. The showreel is a great way to show off your skills of not just the animation work, but working on them also improved my editing skills. Since showreels are a variety of animations put to music, it helped me think about what images I should add to which timepoint, for example, having a character getting hit to a drum hit in the music. Some of the clips I included feature dialogue to give context to the animation that have lip syncing. This is my fourth time making a showreel and you can see stylistic changes through the video with the chronological listings of the animations I created and with how I edited the new showreel compared to the previous versions.
I had designed myself some business cards as a branding method and to give them to anyone interested in my work. It includes my email. I also printed out my CV, which includes a link to my showreel.
Working with Tim and Jonathan helped with my collaboration skills as our skills are vastly different from one another, but working together we created a unique short film that showcases each of our skills from Tim’s character modelling, Jonathan’s environment modelling and my 2d animation. The display that was put together for the short fits the western theme and I’m happy with how everything turned out. The work that was put in by our group was beneficial as through how our team communicated, the combination of the team’s various skillsets and how they were all put together to create the short. I will apply this to whatever job I can get in the animation industry.