07/03/25
In this blogpost I will be showcasing all of the pre production work I made for my groups short film, “The Cherry on top”, which I’m making alongside Nathan, James and Darian. The short is about the karmic downfall of a cherry who encounters a series of random food based characters as he falls down the fridge.
Week 1
The first week was mainly brainstorming different ideas we could use as the story for our film. The only requirement was that it had to be based around the theme of food.
Above is a look at the different ideas we came up with. We decided on narrowing them all down to the five best ones and then seeing which one we liked best.
The five ideas chosen included,
- Sacrifice – A tribe of berries sacrificing one of their own into a blender for the smoothie Gods.
- Journey to the top of the fridge – Two characters scale a large fridge either to find treasure or to save their friend.
- Counter Intelligence – a spy theme short.
- Gumball – About gumballs looking to escape a gumball machine (obviously)
- Deserts and disasters – a dnd inspired short with desert based food items
A bonus idea was making a short based on a deranged chef (heavily based off the Swedish chef from the Muppets), cooking in a kitchen whilst food tries avoiding him.
We did a few discord calls over the weekend to further develop our ideas, eventually settling on a story about a cherry going on an unwilling journey through a fridge and meeting various characters alone the way. Below are some doodles/rough notes I made during some of the calls. Originally I believe the story would just be taking place inside of the freezer but it was eventually changed to a fridge.
Week 2
As part of the homework for this week we had to come up with concept art and some loose storyboards for our film to use for our pitch presentation for week 3. I drew up some different sketches, exploring potential designs for both the main character / side characters.
Partial style influences included the likes of Veggie tales and Sausage Party( Especially in regards to the characters having rubber hose arms) and also the giant vegetable bosses from the game Cuphead. One Idea I had proposed was to have the cherries at the beginning of the short pick on a blueberry, as to have the events of the short film act as karma for one of the cherries. (Or both since they get separated in the end).
Above is some concept art for a scrapped idea where the Cherry encounters a bunch of old mouldy food. All the reference images used where taken from Pinterest.
Next is a look at some design concepts for the ice cream that the cherry ends up on, along with some doodles of the fridge the story takes place in.
Lastly is some of the story boards that I made. One idea was to have a scene where the cherry comes across a protest held by other foods, against them being eaten. Nathan came up with a Pac man inspired character (dubbed the Big Cheese) which would chase the cherry. I incorporated this plot point within my storyboards.
Week 3
Around this point I began to make test models of the cherry/blueberry on blender.
I tried experimenting with using 2D textures for the character’s faces. I looked up some tutorials on YouTube in hopes of making a facial rig which would ideally let you select different expressions for the characters. Below are some of the videos that I watched.
How to Make an Animatable 2D Face in Blender
Three Texture Swapping Methods for Blender
Though I was able to add faces to my models I wasn’t able to get the rig to work how I wanted it to. At most I was able to make the texture scroll across the character’s face to set the expression but I couldn’t figure out how to probably set up a working face rig despite following the tutorials linked above. (I imaging it might have something to do with the overall size of my texture, but I’m not a hundred percent sure) I decided to save this part for whenever we come to covering rigging in class, hopefully I’ll have the processed figured out by then. 😛
In the meantime I worked on making storyboards for the latter half of the short, featuring the mushroom mafia scene which was suggested by Alec.
Week 4/5
For these two weeks it was mainly focused on making the 3D previz for our short film.
Above are some rough character models I made (along with a few probs) Not all would be used for my previz however. As a group we decided on splitting the up the scenes with me offering to do both the scene of the two cherries picking on the blueberry and the cherry encountering the protesters.
(Various behind the scenes shot of me working on the previz).
Also around this point, in order to make them look more distinct I gave the second cherry sunglasses.
Whenever the other members of the team uploaded their previz to our discord channel I downloaded/complied them into one video.
As a group we did talk about making 3D faces instead of using 2D textures, so models would look more consistent with each other, but after some feedback from our week 6 presentation we where told to keep the 2D faces. (The eyes and mouths should be made on separate planes however as to allow for more variations of expressions).
The next step now is working on the finale character models and creating a master link file for the environments.
With all that being said, that’s all I have to show off in regards to the pre production materials I made for the short. As a group we’re really looking forward to getting this short finished and we have a lot of faith that it will turn out well.
That’s all for now
Thanks for reading. 🙂