I knew right off the bat that I wanted to go into 2D animation as that’s where a lot of my interest lies as an animator and I decided to work alone in order to challenge myself and learn each part of the 2D Animation pipeline. Since this was a solo project I knew that I had to follow each step in order to get a solid outcome once the final render was made. I’m not much of a writer so I had to do a lot of research into the beginning stages of the pipeline that I wasn’t so familiar with, from the do’s and don’ts of writing and what makes a good script, to the layout of storyboards, what constitutes a shot, a scene, an act, and how to convey camera movement and character motion in a board.
All in all I did learn a lot about the foundation of what makes any solid animation and I was very excited to learn more. However my eye was always on the actual animating itself, with me being such a big fan of hand-drawn animation I was looking forward to trying it myself at a larger scale that what I’d normally be used to.
Production:
To start off my production I first decided to create spider diagram and began brainstorming different ideas of what I’d want my story to be. After some time I ended up coming up with my first idea for the story, that being of a bunch of rats who form a cult who would sacrifice each other for food, not realising that they were actually being used for experiments by scientists. I wanted for this to be a dark comedy that had cute designs after being inspired by works such as Happy Tree Friends and Unicorn wars, both of which use cute characters to subvert the viewers idea of what the show / movie is with the juxtaposition between visuals and narrative.
For the environment I wanted the idea of having a Rat based population have an impact on the type of architecture that was used, because rats typically reproduce at a high rate and live together in large packs, I imaged them having a higher population within this condensed area and so I looked towards old soviet era apartments along with micro-apartments style apartments found within China, Hong Kong. I like the almost haunting nature this kind of architecture extrudes, to me these styles of architecture gives a strange sense of lifelessness despite almost each and every one of those rooms being fully lived in by people, I felt like the kind of horrific nature they allure would work well with the kind of animation I wanted to produce.
Design:
Before continuing on with the rest of my blog I had to make amends to my story that would alter a lot of my design choices, however my original story had much more development and meaning behind the designs so I will talk about the development of my first story in the beginning and then discuss the development of my second story after as many of the design choices stem from the first story.
Before writing up a script I began working on the designs for the world in my animation. First I looked at my characters, I mentioned previously I took inspiration from media like Happy Tree Friends and Unicorn wars for their cute characters juxtaposing their narrative, however that wasn’t the only reason I looked towards them. With this being a solo project I wanted my characters to have a simple design that would be easy to animate, and so I created a mood board looked towards a couple of things to use as reference, one of the first things being the show OK KO, with their simple, almost geometric designs that wold be simple to replicate and allow for more complex moment without having to spend days on one shot. Next up, one of my more utilised references was a game called Cult of the Lamb, a cute game with very cartoonish characters that leans very heavily into the theme of cult worship. With their big heads, cute eyes I felt like using something stylised like that would help with the expressiveness of my characters, especially since this would be a solo project with no voice acting, using expressions would have to carry the weight of the emotion where voice acting normally would.
Initial concepts:
For my initial concepts I began just blocking out shapes and experimenting with different styles of what the rats might look like, doing this was quick and really helped me pick out elements that I liked and didn’t like about the designs and pick things that I’d use in other develop other designs further. The main features I wanted to keep was for the rats to have a robe of some kind and a pointed face.
Cult Rat:
The final design of the cult rats ended with the rats having a robe with their hood up and a pointed face poking out of said hood, in addition to help sell the idea of it being a Rat I had the ears poking out from the top of the hood as well as giving them a tail. I wanted the robes of the Cult rats to be very simple because I would be drawing them a lot, and so I constructed the main silhouette out of a diamond and a triangle.
When it came down to the rat design I wanted to draw them in three different state so I’d be easily be able to reference them if I needed to draw them with their robes off, their robes on or their robes raised, in the case of the rats raising their arms with their cloaks on.
Fat Rat/Leader Rat:
I knew I wanted for there to be some sort of main bad guy or villain who gives into the will of what they don’t realise is scientists and rallies everyone to kill each other to get more food.
To excruciate his greed and gluttony I wanted to make him much larger than all of the other rats within the Cult, not only would that make him be seen as a character of importance, it would also give him a unique silhouette that’d differentiate him from every other Rat within the story. In addition thought-out history, having a larger size would be seen as a sign of wealth or importance, and with a society of rats who crave food, seeing someone like that would most definitely make the other rats see him as an important figure.
For his outfit I didn’t want it to be too grandiose, while he would be leading the other rats to their doom I wouldn’t imagine he would get any better treatment or be seen as special by those in power, and so his outfit would be that of your average cultist but only modified in order to accommodate for his larger size and nothing else.
Scientists:
For the scientist’s I didn’t want to focus much time on their appearance as they’d only be shown off for a brief amount of time as the big reveal to the audience that the whole ordeal with the rats doing all of these horrible things to each other was nothing more than an experiment.
However I still wanted to convey some kind of personality with their designs. With one of the scientist’s, he’s very square, wears glasses, has his lab-coat on properly and always looks prim and proper, I did this in order to make him appear more formal and sensible. In contrast I designed his lab partner to be much more bubbly and fascinated about science, her face is very round, her hair I’d large and poufy and her lab coat has rolled up sleeves, all in contrast to the other scientist.
Eye God:
For the “god” of the rat Cult I wanted it to resemble an eye in some sort of way, for my original idea I wanted the rats to perceive the scientist’s as some sort of mystical being they watch over them during experimentation. With them being watchers I imagined the rats would see them as all seeing, all knowing beings that can provide for their every need and so I felt the design should reflect that mysterious nature as such. However I felt like it would be hard to make to explain how the scientist’s communicate with the rats and so I decided to change it from an “Eye God” to a device that the rats see as some sort of god.
To reflect this idea I wanted to make the Eye God seem mechanical or technological in some way while see giving off the appearance of an omnipotent being.
I went through a few designs, however I landed on one that I felt was a good mix of both the style and theme. A simple eye shape with two large pieces of material sitting on either side of it, with this the silhouette of the eye will resemble that of an eyelid leaning further into the eye motif and straying away from the God just looking like a ball in the sky.
Background Design:
For my backgrounds I wanted to try and develop something that was both visually instructed but also relatively simple to create in order help get rid of some of the workload that I’d have to deal with since this was a solo project.
For my research I looked into many different animations and cartoons to see how they presented their backgrounds and see the techniques used. One of the animations I really enjoyed the look of in terms of backgrounds and environment and studied was a short called “This actually Happens A Lot” by animator Tom Law, I really enjoyed their backgrounds because while they were relatively simple they did a good job of conveying the area using sketchy basic lines to outline the environment and maintained a very interesting aesthetic that I found appealing. In addition to that one of other main things I researched was the works of Soddikin, a lot of their work involves the use the of 2D animation and or pixel animation, however what catches my eye with their work a lot is their backgrounds, many times they make use of textures in their backgrounds. Many of the times they animate their textures which I feel makes their work really pop and stand out from the style of many others.
Initial designs:
From my research and reference collecting I began to put together some designs for what I wanted the style of my backgrounds. For this I wanted to include various design elements that I found appealing from my research, during my design process I wanted to make sure that my backgrounds were simple in nature so I can easily produce them, and in addition to that I also wanted to include textures of some kind in order to make the backgrounds stand out more and have them be more visually appealing.
For my initial designs I wanted to draw out a few areas that the rats might live in, and so I drew the rats both in and round apartments in order to see if the style looked appealing and both fit the theme that I was going for. Being that the rats lived in an otherworldly place I wanted to try and replicate that sort of idea with the style of the world.
Script and Story writing:
Once the design process of the characters were finished I began turned towards the story and the script of the animation, I had a rough idea of what I wanted beforehand already with a cult of rats unknowingly praising a couple of scientists who are young them for experimentation, however at this point I needed to develop on this idea.
I had never written a script before this point so it a big learning experience for me knowing how to block out each scene, labelling them cleanly so any reader will know where the scene is taking place and when, and learning about what writers do in order to differentiate between a character talking, doing an action or both. I was able to learn though tips given by websites like studio binder which taught me things like differentiating between better transitions like cutting and fading. In addition to this I read though some scripts to see how screenwriters go about laying their scripts out.
When writing out my I was aiming to write a dark comedy that satirises cults, exaggerating them to the point where something as simple as food can bring a whole civilisation into the loop. The story is sit in a large rat civilisation that’s been having food shortages. It was going to centre between main characters, one who we follow from the start, sees the cult take over within moments and then disappear, realising the insanity of the situation, it’ll then move to the Cult Leader, who brings forth the eye god and displays that making sacrifices will bring them food, his appearance to is much larger than the rest if the rats used to depict his greed and willingness to sacrifice other for food. He kills for food and once the rest of society is fully on his side, things begin snowballing and the rats begin killing each other in order to get more and more food, but it slowly turns into a massacre and as more and more food falls, the Cult Leader struggles to dodge the food until he eventually gets crushed by a big piece of cheese. I wanted to do this as a metaphor, that the Cult leaders greed ultimately led to his demise. In the end there’d be the big reveal, a scientist is watching closely at what’s going on in what’s revealed to be a cage full of rats, revealing to the audience that there was never a god, but just scientists using this supposed society for experimentation.
I wanted to try and tell a story surrounding a necessity becoming greed however when trying to put this down into a storyboard that’ll only last around a minute and a half was really hard, and that got reflected in the feedback I got when presenting it to others. Nothing was too clear and trying to cram everything in under two minutes made it feel bloated.
Second story:
After writing up my first story and getting feedback I felt that starting over would be my best bet after getting the feedback I did and learning more about screenwriting I felt that I would be able to produce another story that worked better and conveyed the intended message better. For this story I wanted it to be on the same sort of lines of greed is bad, and have that be the main crux of the story. In many ways this story is much like the first one but re-imagined.
This new story is centred around a small kingdom in desert, unlike the first story where it centres around a single protagonist it centres around the village as a whole. Like the other story however there is a villain of the story, being that of the king of the rats who’s the only person in this village with a place to live that isn’t crumbling around them and just has a surplus of everything.
Like the first story there is a food shortage, but instead of it coming from a large populous, it comes down to the fact that there has been a drought for a long time that has prevented a village from growing food. The towns people go to their king begging for food and protesting for him to share his surplus with the starving rats of the village. Instead of actually sharing and giving what he owes he approached by a god who gives him the same choice as the first story though a vision. Though this vision he is shown himself giving out an order for one rat to kill another, once the rat is dead the god presents them with food. When he comes out of the vision and tries to do this however, he ends up being the one getting stabbed instead of his subjects, bringing an end to his greed through the wrath of his people.
Storyboard/Animatic:
For the storyboarding and animatic I wanted to keep them rough and sort of freeform because I knew it would have just been me using these for the most part so I understood what I’d want, however in hindsight I would have gone back and tired to do them more professionally in order to properly learn the techniques and stuff used in order to make a professional looking storyboard.
Schedule:
When drawing out my schedule for the animated short wanted to make sure that I separated out each individual part of the 2D Animation pipeline, the script/writing and world designs, storyboards, key frames and backgrounds, rough animation, clean-up and colour animation and finally editing/compositing.
I first made my schedule on paper at the start of the school year when we were given sheets to paper to layout out time, I later took that sheet and translated that into a excel document. Using an excel document I would be able to organise my time much better and be able colour coordinate each part of the pipeline to indicate preproduction, production and post production. I was also able to make a checklist of things to do within each section, this allows me to better judge what time I have left and, if I’m behind or ahead of schedule and also make changes to my schedule if need be.
For the most part I was able to keep up with my initial schedule for the first semester of university up until we went on our break for Christmas. However after Christmas there were some things out of my control that prevented me from working for a couple of months after our Christmas break which left me to remake the second half of my schedule.
Animation:
The animating is where I spent the majority of my time when it came to the development of this animation and I knew this going in so I wanted to make sure when I was picking the software to use that I was picking the right software. When looking through there were a few options available to me, the one that stood out in the beginning was Adobe Animate as that was the program that I had been using from the start of my university education and the on I was most familiar with. However I know its not the most popular program to use and many studios tend to avoid it and so to increase my knowledge in more popular software I decided to pick something else in this case. From there my main two options were either TV Paint or Toonboom Harmony, with TV Paint in my research its fairly popular with Animators who do hand-drawn animation and I considered this when making my choice because I do prefer hand drawn animation myself, however I ended up dismissing that and going with ToonBoom because it’s generally the more popular choice among studios and would help in the future when it comes to employment. In addition to this I’ve also had some experience with ToonBoom during my second year of university and I enjoyed some of the features like the cutting tool, that removes parts of lines that cross another line. Seeing this i felt that it would come in handy when cleaning my work, in addition to that I liked how Toonboom handles colours where you can change any colour on multiple frames in a split second, so that came and helped with my decision making.
For my animation process I wanted to try and make as much of my actual animation hand drawn as possible to help improve my skills and showcase my abilities when it comes to putting my work on display during showcases and in my show reel, meaning that if I felt like pegs and shapes weren’t necessary or would lessen the quality of the animation. When animating I wanted my style of animating to reflect that of the world, I wanted things to look messy and unclean to reflect not only the style, but the world, to do this I make use of my roughs, instead of going over my lines again for cleanup, I decided to just do the rough animation and go back after to clean things up and make the rats more appealing to look at. Not only did this save time by cutting out the clean-up entirely, but it also gave it the rugged look I wanted to go for. To accentuate this I incorporated boiling lines into my work, I was inspired to do this again by Tom Law’s “This happens a lot actually” and shows like Edd Ed n Eddy. With boiling lines nothing feels still, everything feels like it’s flowing and moving, and with my style of animation where I just use the roughs, it makes things stand out less when it goes from pose to pose. Using boiling lines too I can draw the viewers eyes to whatever I want, by having rats I the background be still and have a character move with boiling lines, the audiences eye will be drawn more to the thing that’s constantly moving as opposed to still background characters.
Music:
For my animation I wanted for it to have its own background music for two major reasons, one of them being that by having my own music made or making my own music I could subvert the need to get the copyright of a song before being able to use it in my animation. In addition to that having my own music made would allow for me to have it changed to suit what I want, and give the kind of atmosphere I want to provide for the animation.
Before talking to a music producer I decided to make my own music to allow for anyone who I talk to later to understand further what I want from them in terms of general feel and genre.
After making a quick piece as a reference point I teamed up with a friend of mine who goes by the name “Conundrym” online. Before getting to work on the music I discussed with them what kind of feel I was going for, for the music, the beats of the animation and from there they spent a couple of days producing a song based off the description I gave them.
From there I listened to the song and made some notes , seeing what I did and didn’t like, what I wanted to see more of and seeing if the song matched my vision. And for the most part it did, there were just a few changes I wanted made in order to get the ideal music. And so we both went into a call together and began to discuss my notes, and we went back and forth making suggestions to each other u til we got a final outcome I was happy with.
Editing:
From there it was time for editing, when it came to editing i had very little experience using any editing software outside of using Premier Pro for other projects we had during previous years of university.
There wasn’t very much editing to be done outside of taking all the finished scenes and matching the audio up with the video, however I did have to make a fade transition from one scene to another that I had forgotten to do in the actual animation.
In addition to this I had also noticed that there was an animation error in one of my exported scenes. During the scenes where it shows close-ups of a bunch of different rats begging for food, I had noticed on a second watch through that I accidentally forgot to change the line colour of one of the foreground elements from blue to red, and so I had to go back in the animation file, find the blue line and change it to red using Toon Booms colour picker, which allows for you to change any colour to another almost immediately.
Conclusion:
In conclusion despite the ups and downs of the process from factors both outside and inside the process of the animating, I feel very relieved to have finally gotten my work done, and to have an animation actually longer than ten seconds under my belt. Coming from doing a lot of short clips, to making an actual animated short was a major challenge, but I feel like it was a good one, I was able to learn a lot about the animation process and pipeline.
I was really able to develop my animation knowledge and techniques too, from this I have learned so much about ToonBoom Harmony and I will be using that exclusively from now on as my main program for animating, on top of that I was able to use some techniques that I hadn’t really tried before, for example using different colours for secondary motion or pieces of the body that would move differently from the rest, this was a very useful technique when it came to animating because I would be able to clearly see different parts of the body and not confuse lines when using something like the onion skin and skimming though frames.
On top of this I was able to tap into parts of the animation pipeline I hadn’t really touched before, a major one being storyboarding and script writing, after making this animation I came to appreciate how important boarding and scripts are. They are the foundation of any good animation and if they falter then the rest of the animation would go down with it, I’m doing to he working on those skills a lot in the future in order to prevent anything like that from happening in the future.
That all being said I did notice some negatives come from this that I will need to take note of in the future, and that is bring work load. The amount of work taken to work on an animation alone is immense. While I did know it was a lot of work I didn’t fully see the scope of it all until I got mid way though. I had noticed that when doing all of these new things I would end up getting almost stun locked, when it came to the actual roughs of the animation I had to work very hard to actually just begin working, in addition I had felt very burnt out once the animation was actually finished and it made it hard to do much of any artwork afterwards.
However that all being said I feel like this was a very positive experience and I can’t wait to learn from this and develop my skills to become a better animator.