The Group
Over the summer, Nicole Thompson and I decided to become a group to create a 2D animated short film as we both enjoy the aspects of 2D animation and had worked well together on a previous project in first year. We knew we would make a great team as we both wanted to make some sort of 2D animation and both of our art styles blend together nicely. To make communication and file sharing easier we set up a Discord server and a OneDrive, this helped us to stay organised, keep all our files backed up and allowed us to access each other’s files. We also set up a Miro board for brainstorming, an Excel sheet to break to make a shot list and a Trello board for scheduling and to do lists, we later changed to an excel sheet as we found we used it more.
The Idea
We started to brainstorm story ideas; on a Miro board, we wrote whatever ideas came to our minds in the moment as well as researching story prompts on Google and Pinterest for inspiration, these ideas were very vague as we wanted to get as many ideas out as possible. After writing down the ideas Nicole and I went through and tried to make a story for each idea.
After expanding the ideas, we went through and discussed which we liked and which we didn’t, the main ways we narrowed them down was to discuss if it inspired us, if we could imagine it becoming a 2D short film and if the idea could be flushed out more to make a stronger story. After narrowing down the ideas we had four options left; Pi-Rats, Arcade Animatronics, The Perfect Shot and The Art Thief. We decided the next course of action was to break down the four stories as if they were an animatic, this really helped us to see whether the idea would work. After some discussion we decided to remove The Art Thief and Arcade Animatronics as we felt The Perfect Shot and Pi-Rats would work better as an animation and we were more motivated and excited about those ideas.
To decide between our final two ideas, we created some rough storyboards to visualise how the story would look if it were to be animated. I drew the Pi-Rats storyboards and Nicole drew The Perfect Shot. We knew we wanted the film to last around a minute and a half and after looking at the storyboards we decided The Prefect Shot would not have worked as the story was quite short and we could not think of how to extend it, we also enjoyed the comedic style of Pi-Rats more. After realising we liked a more comedic approach, we decided to revisit Arcade Animatronics, the story easily had the capacity to be more humorous and fun, so we decided to choose Arcade Animatronics.
(My storyboards)
(Nicole’s Storyboards)
When we told the tutors our idea, we were told to add a message to the story, this would help with character development and give the audience something they could relate to, so we revamped the plot to show the conflict between new and old as well as accepting change. These are some films with similar messages and themes.
Now that we knew the overarching message, we worked on blocking out the new plot points of the story. We used Miro as it allowed us to easily shuffle or edit the plot as we went. In the first iteration of the story Gumball comes across as too evil as he goes out of his way to sabotage Lollipop and barely shows remorse for what he has done.
The second iteration still has Gumball as the main antagonist, purposely attacking Lollipop, however he shows a little more compassion near the end. This version is closer to what we wanted but there is a lot of pointless filler as well as not entirely conveying the message we want the story to have.
After some more discussion with Nicole as well as the tutors we changed the characters dynamics so they both would annoy and try to one-up each other rather than go out of their way to sabotage, this aligned more with our message as well as showing the how the characters develop from being self-centered to putting a child’s happiness first.
