In March, I participated in the CCAD 24-Hour Animation contest, alongside 3 of my other alumni friends, Jinny Hinkle, Hillary Hastings, and Laura Mansfield. This year they let alumni participate, so we were excited to have the opportunity to participate, since it had been something CCAD started doing after we graduated.
Before I take you through the process behind our short film, I'll post the extended version (with additional credits and a custom title screen) that we created here:
Now I'm going to go over our process. The kickoff video in Discord started at 6:30 PM on Friday March 19th where we got the prompt, which was this video. And from there, we all hopped into a Discord voice chat where we brainstormed ideas. Our first idea was about someone watching movies on their TV in their living room while all of their food came to life. But then we came up with the idea where there's this afterlife that looks like a drive-in theater, where whichever food you eat, it makes you remember a different memory.
Once we had that idea, we started to draw concepts of the main character. Hillary drew our storyboard thumbnails and I timed them out into an animatic. Then Jinny started to create the color scripts while Laura drew more character concepts.
Here's how our storyboards, color scripts, and final animation compare:
We finished our edit of the color scripts into an animatic about 6 hours in, so we were ready to start animating and working on backgrounds! We figured out some final looks and color tests, so I made these color tests based on Jinny's color scripts:
Hillary and Laura went to bed at some point while Jinny continued to work on backgrounds and I worked on the sound design for our film. I made a shot list in Google Sheets for us to keep track of the progress of each of our shots.
In the morning around 7-9 AM, Hillary and Laura came back online to help out with backgrounds, while Jinny finished up the character rig that she created in Photoshop. From there, all of us animated various scenes and basically just kept revising as we went.
Around noon, we finished all of the animations and I put together a final edit while everyone went to grab some lunch. We wrote notes and make some final edits to adjust some of the timing and make final changes. Around 3 PM, we finished entirely and exported the final video and watched it a few times together as a group. And by 4 PM, I submitted the final short film for judging. Jinny and I ordered Noodles & Company, then passed out immediately after.
Here's an image I put together of our OCs before we worked on the project:
So overall, we had a lot of fun and were really happy with how it came out! For me, this felt more intense than Global Game Jams because animating is a lot of work, and also we had a lot less time to work with. But I would do it again! We all felt super motivated to work on our own projects after this, so it was a huge booster for us.
I also learned a lot while working on this. I hadn't done a lot of sound design edits on projects before, so to spend hours focusing on that, I had a lot of fun. And overall this was probably the largest Premiere file I'd ever created, with tons of sequences nested inside of each other. My main job on the project was editing, since we were constantly updating the film and needed me to do that almost full-time. I did get to draw some concepts and animate a scene though, which was fun!
And then afterwards, we put together a documentary where we talk about our process and the whole event!
So anyway, thanks for reading this post and watching our short film!
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