Pre-Production
Our group’s pre-production process for our 3D animated short was highly collaborative, creative, and I found it to be a really fun experience overall. We kicked things off by brainstorming as a team, thinking through different potential settings for our story. Eventually, we landed on the idea of setting it in a grocery store. It felt like the right choice because it gave us a solid foundation to build the story around, and it offered a lot of creative potential for characters and plotlines. Once we decided on the setting, we all contributed to shaping a rough story idea that would take place within that environment.
To start developing the story more visually, each group member created their own storyboard based on the rough plot. This was a really good way for everyone to share their vision and get their ideas across in a way that words sometimes can’t. Once we had all of the storyboards done, we came together to go through them, and from there, we picked out the best bits of each one to form a final storyboard. That way, every person’s input was still present in the final plan, and it felt like something we all had contributed to equally.
After we had our final storyboard agreed on, we divided it into five parts. Each person chose a section that they wanted to animate, which helped keep things fair and gave everyone ownership of a piece of the film. Around this time, we also started developing our characters and the grocery store environment in more detail. We used group calls to chat through ideas and used Pinterest and a shared Magma board to collect references and brainstorm. These tools made it easier to stay on the same page and visually communicate what we wanted everything to look like.
We pulled inspiration from quite a few existing animations to help inform our designs. Some of the key ones were Veggie Tales, Beauty and the Beast, The Amazing World of Gumball, and Wall-E. These were helpful in different ways. Veggie Tales and Gumball were great for showing how everyday objects and food items can be turned into fun, lively characters, and Wall-E especially inspired our robot customers and shop staff. We liked EVE’s design and decided to use some of that energy for our robots. For our egg carton character, we looked at the teapot from Beauty and the Beast because they had a similar vibe in terms of personality, since the egg carton is a mother to all of the eggs inside, just like the teapot is a mother to the teacup. Another big influence for us was The Wild Robot, mainly because we really liked the way the brush-stroke textures gave the characters a painted, hand-crafted look. We wanted to try applying that kind of style to our own models too.
We also spent time thinking about the overall mood and atmosphere we wanted our animation to have. Since the setting was a grocery store, we wanted it to feel both familiar and slightly whimsical, to reflect the personality of our food based characters. We discussed lighting, for example, we decided to keep the lighting soft and slightly warm to create a friendly, inviting feel while also helping to unify the colour palette across scenes. Colour played a big role in our design choices too as we wanted each character to stand out but also compliment the environment, so we used references from real product packaging to guide our choices. For example, brighter colours were used for more energetic or silly characters, while cooler tones were used for calmer or more robotic ones, like the store staff. This attention to visual tone helped us create an animation that felt coherent and polished, even with our different scenes being worked on individually. We did end up giving the customer robot a warm colour palette due to the fact that it was a similar robot model to the staff robot, and it might have looked too similar if it also had cool toned texturing.
For characters, we each designed one unique character of our own. Each of us made concept art for our character to use as a reference during modelling, which made the process clearer and easier. On top of that, we also looked at video games for extra inspiration. Animal Crossing: New Horizons was one of them, especially because of the cute food and meal models in the game. We also looked at some of Chilla’s Art’s horror games, since they usually feature grocery stores and had some really good layout and lighting references that we found helpful for our environment.
The pre-production phase was honestly a good mix of fun and focus. We were all on the same page when it came to the visual direction, and we managed to keep things balanced between being creative and being organised. It gave us a strong base going into production and made the whole process feel a lot more manageable.
To stay organised and keep things moving, we held weekly group calls where we talked about ideas, shared progress, and planned what needed to happen next. These calls helped keep everyone updated and gave us a chance to problem-solve together. We also used our shared Discord server almost every day to send screenshots, files, and give each other feedback. That constant communication helped a lot, and we kept it going right through the rest of the project.
Production
Once we got into the production phase, we moved from planning into actually building the animation. The first thing we did was block out a rough version of the grocery store environment in Blender. This helped us figure out where everything would go and how the scenes would flow. We also added simple placeholder models for our characters so we could get a sense of the camera angles and how the characters would move around. With the rough scene laid out, we each went on to animate our individual parts using the placeholder characters, creating a previs animation to test everything out. The only issue with our previs was that one of our group members never finished their scenes on time, so we had to leave the opening sequences out of it. We presented this previs to our lecturers and class to get feedback before we started working on the final versions. This early version gave us a chance to make changes without losing time later down the line.
Around this time, we also started playing with sound and music to test how audio might affect the vibe of the animation. Once we had our feedback and made our changes, we moved into full production. Each group member started working on modelling, rigging, and texturing their assigned character. I was in charge of the peanut butter jar character, and I wanted it to have a painted, handmade look like we talked about earlier. I gave it a glassy texture to make it look like a real peanut butter jar while keeping it stylised. The glass effect added a bit of realism without breaking the look we were going for.
Rigging the peanut butter jar was a bit of a challenge for me. It wasn’t the most complicated rig since the character had a pretty simple design, but I hadn’t rigged a character like this before, so I found it a bit confusing at first. Luckily, my teammates were really helpful, and with their support, I was able to get it done. We also worked together to build out the environment, modelling props like shelves, lights, posters, and the checkout counter. I made some extra grocery items for the shelves too, like bottles and cans, to make the store feel more realistic. We kept the paintbrush texture style going throughout the environment so it all felt cohesive.
One of the bigger problems I ran into was a delay in starting my animation. My scene included another team member’s character, and I couldn’t begin animating until they finished rigging and texturing it. They were running behind and weren’t super active in the Discord server at the time, so it was hard to get updates. After waiting a few days, I realised I didn’t have any more time to spare since the deadline was right around the corner. I ended up using their previs character instead of the final version so I could still finish my scene on time. This was frustrating and slightly disappointing as I really wanted to use a complete model, and I felt it brought my animation down.
When I did get into animating, I found another issue; the Blender scene was really laggy. Because of that, it was hard to tell how fast or slow my animation was. After I rendered it, I realised it was playing way too fast. Ideally, I would’ve gone back and adjusted the keyframes, but any time I tried to edit them, it caused more issues. Since it was the day before the deadline, the safest option was to slow down the render in post-production instead of trying to fix it in Blender. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked well enough for the deadline. I’ll definitely keep this in mind for future projects though, now I know to test playback speeds more carefully even when the software is lagging. In the end, my scene came out to be 79 frames. It probably would’ve been a lot more if I hadn’t run into those speed issues.
The last few things I had to do were add some final textures to the shop walls, tweak some of the lighting, and render the final scene. The lighting we used was mainly a bunch of point lights as well as an HDRI environment. Unfortunately we were not able to add textures to our shelves, flooring and roof since we were cut for time and figured that there were a lot more important things we had to prioritize at this stage, however it still looks fine in the final animation as you cant tell as much, it just would have been nice to get some extra detail in there. Throughout production, our group stayed in touch through calls and Discord, which really helped us stay on track. We were able to give each other feedback and support when someone had a technical issue or just needed advice on something. Even though there were a few issues, it was a rewarding phase overall.
Post-Production
For post-production, I used CapCut to slow down my animation, since the original render was way too fast. I had to split it at every camera cut and change the speed of each part manually. CapCut actually had a bug when I was editing, so it took a bit of trial and error, but I got there in the end and exported the finished video. Our group also organised a call where we put all of our scenes together in CapCut. We added sound effects and background music during this call to make the final animation more polished. The sound effects and music definitely added a lot to our animation, and we were starting to feel properly proud of our work. We also added a simple credits scene, and we would have liked to have done a title scene but unfortunately we did not have enough time to implement this. Some of our group members were still finishing their parts at this point, and one person did not finish theirs at all, so we had to submit our final animation using placeholder scenes for the first few parts. Despite that setback, we managed to get all of the other tasks done and submitted on time.
Looking back, this project was a great experience. It had its challenges for sure, like technical issues, time pressure, and uneven participation, but it also taught me a lot. I learned how important it is to have good communication in a group project. Even with the tough parts, I enjoyed the process and felt proud of what we created as a team. I was honestly feeling quite disappointed in the fact that we couldnt see our whole animation done as a group since one member just had not finished theirs in time, we had all talked about how we were excited to see what all of our hard work and effort would come together to create at the end, but I will use this as a learning experience as it was out of my control.
