I came up with the idea for my short film after seeing more reports in the local news about MVAWG. My mum is a community peace builder particular in rural women’s spaces. I often volunteer and go to events with her. I feel like I have something to say about this issue due to all the work I have done in this area.
As this is a sensitive topic I decided to reach out to some women I have went to events with to get their perspective on how I should approach the topic. This is what I sent them.
Three of these women I have reached out to have agreed to meet with me to answer some questions here are some of the highlights of our conversations:
After these conversations I went and gathered references for my film.
I am keeping all of these on a Milanote board to keep everything organised.
I got really useful feedback from my presentation that I will take into account going forward in my film. The main feedback was that the selkie needed a reason to leave the water and for the details in the 2nd act to be more ironed out so the audience understands why she then wants to leave.
Pre Production:
After the feedback I was gave I went to look for more references to help improve my work.
Character development:
Selkie:
I wanted to create some very different initial designs to get a range of ideas I could pull from. I then bashed together the elements I liked from each design to get a final body design. Once I got this I started to create hair/outfit iterations until I reached my final design.
Final turnaround
Turn arounds can be something I really struggle with. As I would love to be a character designer once I graduate I know that it is a skill that I need to work on.
Colour tests
To help me with drawing this turnaround I created a rough mockup of the character in blender that can be used for my storyboards etc.
Man:
This character was really difficult for me to design. I had a lot of conflicting ideas of how this character should look. I was initially really hesitant to show this character at all but just letting the audience hear them.
I also created a rough 3d mockup of this character as well.
Seal:
This was the most fun thing for me to design, I really wanted to experiment with the silhouette and size as seals are very simple and are basically broken down into two circles and a triangle.
Environment development:
As I struggle with drawing backgrounds especially in dynamic perspectives I created a rough mockup in blender. I used The Sims 4 to create a layout that I then used this to create a rough model in blender.
I haven’t used blender since 2nd year as my placement focused on using AE so getting used to the software again wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be.
For my scenes I initially was going to have a lineless background like most of my influences however that made the characters feel like they didn’t belong there.
Story:
Script:
I expanded what was my basic synopsis was to a full story.
I used this version as a basis for my storyboard/animatic.
However due to the story lacking some depth and details having issues I had to completely overhaul the 2nd and then 3rd act. I went back to square one.
Before I began boarding I looked at other solo animated shorts. I specifically looked for shorts made by students as well. I wanted to get a rough idea on how many shots etc is appropriate for a 2-3 minute long video. I also wanted to look at shot composition and what did/didn’t work well for each film.
I really struggled on where to get started with the storyboard. I had a lot of ideas but I wasn’t sure on what would be the best approach. I found Toniko Pantoja’s videos about boarding to be really helpful.
These videos allowed me to cut down the amount of shots I had in the earlier stages as I was over boarding scenes. It also encouraged me to push shots to be more ambitious rather than just going for what is ‘easy to animate’.
As I wanted it to be fully polished and done to have time to complete an animatic for the pre production presentation I spent a lot of time drawing very fast. This caused me to have a lot of wrist/arm pain.
Based on my feedback that was given to me I had a lot to change about my story so I went back to basics.
This then lead me to
Animatic:
I took my boards and cut them into a very rough animatic.
There are a lot of timing issues with this rough cut and I made the mistake of not separating the layers of my boards. It did give me a base to work from to improve on an actual animatic draft.
The feedback I got from my pre production presentation then forced me to change gears.
After a lot of reiteration of the script and storyboard I was able to make a first animatic draft.
I still wasn’t happy with this one as it is very messy and there are clear issues however it gives me a starting point to off off to improve later.
The animatic helped me to see what needed test animations.
Tests:
I took the feedback and what I had learnt from the previous test to do this next one. This time I set up some basic lighting and a camera in blender to make it easier to paint over in Photoshop. I took multiple screenshots from the same camera shot with different objects visible to let me paint over it clearly.
The shot with all objects and lighting on.
The breakdown of how objects were visible.
I was cautious to keep layers separate to then let me then edit and move it properly in AE.
