Over the summer, I was still in placement, so I rarely had time to come up with multiple ideas. With the free 2 weeks, I had two ideas for my major project but when I spoke to my lecturer about one, about a girl trying to deliver a letter to her crush. It had a weird pacing, and the plot didn’t make sense, so instead of trying to rewrite and fix it. I started on my other idea about two office workers. I did start character designs and such for the original idea, so that the start of everything does look high school-y.
RESEARCH
To begin, I took a look at other short films and how they were created.
Lyly Haong’s animated short was so fun to watch. She had created her own original story with voice acting, I was inspired by her use of colours and simple character designs. Luckily she had posted a video along side explaining each step of the progress from script writing, pre-production, production etc. She speaks about the issues and how she overcomes them along with her thoughts behind why she did certain things for her short film. I really liked how she planned her scope and used spread sheets to organise everything so later on, I’ll be doing the same. ☺
Miv Choi also had also created an animated film, It was animated to music. She explains a bit more about the storyboard and animatic compare to Lyly. It was a very honest video about her struggles too and included notes and how to make it more manageable. I wasn’t a fan of the video itself since it was a text video and not a voice over.
START
SCRIPT
To begin, I needed to write a script first following the 1 page equals to 1 minute of screen time, this helps me pace my story easier and make sure it’s do-able. I did do a story script for my previous idea which landed me on 2.5 pages but luckily with the change. My script for this idea was a lot shorter.
VISUAL DEVELOPMENT
After, I collected images for influence. I had a rough idea of how the story could play out visually with character designs and backgrounds, starting from the gloomy office life to the slightly more brighter midway but then back to the blue gloomy look.
I plan on adding more later on before I start drawing and designing props, characters and backgrounds. But right now this was just to help me research into some other things such as…
VIDEO INFLUENCES
I also went through some videos that could influence my idea or mainly guide my story so I don’t get too side track and lean into something else or just start generating more ideas.
Eve’s music video ‘insomnia’ is the bigger influence for my colour script, with the limited colours. It creates multiple different vibes by just changing the hues.
Another big inspiration is Emily Xu. I love her illustrative backgrounds paired up with her animated simple characters. It allows the watcher to admire both elements at the same time through their contrast. These were my early inspiration for my idea. Later on, I did a lot more research into other illustrative artists.
ART STYLE INSPIRATION
I picked out two artists who could inspire my art style as animating in my own art style would take long, My main inspiration is Dana Terrace since I’m a big fan of The Owl House and the illustrations that were created with it. While Juanmoa has been an inspiration for how I design characters for a while. Along with how she draws folds in clothes and expressions.
And again we see Emily Xu for my background inspiration, I liked Sheya Chen’s work as it includes a wide shot of the environment, with the limited colours and shapes. It’s easy to tell what everything is and the distance it is from the camera. Personally I would love to have created my short film in my own style but I want to make it manageable.
CINEMATOGRAPHY
I decided to look into some cinematography that could happen so it can help with my pacing, mainly the colours so that I can create an easier understanding of the mood and the directions that my characters moves in to create an uneasy feeling. I find researching cinematography really helps later on in the storyboard planning.
EARLY VISUALS – Idea 01
CHARACTERS
As mentioned before, the characters are a lot more high school looking. Really all I had to do was adjust the anatomy and clothes to suit an office worker which was easy enough. After selecting a few elements that I liked from these characters, I was able to quick collect a few new images of clothes designs.
ENVIRONMENT
While the building I had created was able to be reused for the office building.
ROUGH STORYBOARD
I wanted to get a shit storyboard down for feedback just to see if my pacing was fine, I personally don’t like it since you can’t really tell what character is who and the background didn’t explain the dynamic camera angle I was going for.
WEEK 3 – PITCH PRESENTATION & Feedback
I had Yuan, Alec and Henry for my presentation. I had received good feedback on my pitch! The main feedback I needed to focus on was ‘why the pen is so important’ or ‘put my detail to the pen’ which I agree. Right after, I started drawing up the new character designs for my story and made some prop designs before jumping into storyboarding. The feedback for my storyboard was the composition of the camera and character placement which I do struggle a lot but hopefully with the lecturer’s guidance, I can get it down.
So far the main issue I’m finding with my work is that I’m too precious with having everything look clean even if it’s concept art which takes up some extra time. The reason being I’m very use to putting down shapes and jumping straight into line art which definitely slows me down by 100x. I am NOT feeling too confident on the pace I’m moving at.
WEEK 4 – TUTORIAL GROUPS
The following week, I was split up and luckily had Sarah as my lecturer for my tutorials. ☻ Aodhan was also in the room so I had double feedback which I really appreciated and they were very helpful with any questions that I had. The main feedback I had received was the character designs for Crow. Instead of leaning into mid looking guy, I needed to make him more handsome then give Bunny some more hair which I’m struggling with coming up, but with my previous designs for the high school story. I ended up with giving her the heart like pony tail.
