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!
For this month's Improvement Movement prompt, I played around with colors and lighting. I decided to take a scene from Detective Ragger for this one. I wanted this scene to take place at night, but I had fun coming up with different light sources and light colors.
These are all 4 of the variations together!
This is the original with flat colors.
And the process it took to get the flats laid out.
First I did the window lighting.
And here's the window lighting process.
Then I tried out moonlighting.
And this is the process for getting to the moonlighting.
And finally, the police car lighting.
And the final process for the police car lighting.
Dark Thunder and Jaboo playing fighting games in the living room. This is part 2 of this month's Improvement Movement drawing that I did the other day of them in the fighting game. July's theme was characters interacting!
This month's Improvement Movement challenge was to draw a character in a bunch of different poses, so I chose Clove! I also wanted to draw her in costumes that she wears throughout the series.
On one of my days off, I took the opportunity to spend some time on an illustration, since I've been meaning to do more of those!
Clove finally meets her brother Ralphie in her dreams. I wrote this Eventure the other day, so I wanted to do a little illustration of one of the scenes. Also played around a bit with lighting in this one.
When Yuka’s powers are awakened, she seeks out vengeance on Death with her partner, Mabui. I started on this illustration yesterday and had some time to finish it up today. I haven't drawn Yuka in years and this was my first time ever drawing Mabui! These are just some ideas for the Death Finale Eventure, when I rewrite it.
This was a scene that was really vivid while I was writing it, so I decided to draw it. I really need to go back and actually rewrite the Shitaka Fireworks Eventure so it can show the backstory of what actually happened.
Scott gets arrested for his crimes in Shitaka City, but Aya comes to his rescue and breaks him free.
And then here's a process gif for this illustration!
So I'm doing a throwback to an old project from Summer 2012 called the Improvement Movement. Some friends are joining me in doing monthly prompts so we can keep working on concepts and developing our personal stories.
This is an age progress for Zandra!
The story points include:
Age 1: Her grandfather Oleg loses her while he's babysitting, so she begins living with her other grandfather Rocko.
Age 5: Rocko starts to teach her how to fight, while under his care.
Age 10: She returns to live with her parents Jaboo and Cassie, and first enters The Worlds. This is how she looks at the very beginning of The Nays.
Age 18: Her current day-self as of right now. This is during the World Leader Exam times when she's becoming close friends with Yaguzi.
Age 25: When The Nays travel to the future, they see this Zandra: her future self from Clove's timeline.
Age 35 - Age 80: I haven't actually made any of these in the story itself, but they're ideas of how she might end up looking!
You can find the website for our Improvement Movement project here, but for now, this is the only entry I've done (since it's still the first month)!
It's time for the New Year's tradition of drawing Cipo! This is the 10th one I've done, so it's the 10 Year Anniversary of this tradition. Since this year I'm planning to work on my interactive story some more, I thought it'd be fitting to draw a scene from one of our newest Eventures: Terra's Disappearance. He picked up this saying from Kolo who started saying goodnight to The Nays in this way for some reason. But this is also the first drawing I've ever done of a Linkship (and the interior, too!).
It's been awhile since I've dedicated some time to gesture drawings since I've been so busy, but I decided to do that the other week. And from there, I made a finished drawing!
Here's the finished illustration!
And then the process gif.
As a bonus, here are all of the quick gestures I did in about 1-3 minutes each.
When Zandra and Yaguzi are released from the Rectory of Reform, Cipo holds an M Nays Reunion Party in hopes to welcome them back into the group. Amelia excitedly takes a selfie with them because it's a big event. They're not exactly expecting it and are caught by surprise.
Here's the final drawing that I did!
And this is a gif to showcase the process. I ended up putting a bunch of filters on it because I was hoping to get an "Instagram filter" effect through Photoshop. I'm not going to go into the details, but you can check out the gif to see what I added.
And then this was the drawing BEFORE adding all of the filters.
This week's Concept Sunday drawing takes place during the Lakewood Library Eventure when Elfno and the rest of The Nays are chasing after the bootleggers. When my brother was reading this part, I envisioned a really cool shot, so I decided to do an illustration of it! This is the part that he wrote for the Eventure: <Chozu> Ew, the other two are getting away though! <Elfno> Yes! Towards the pop-up book section! * Elfno leads the others into the children's area. One of the tao faces stops for a moment to throw a bunch of stuffed animals at The Nays. * Elfno whips out his sword and slices through a stuffed bear, causing fur and cotton to fly in every direction.
Here's the final illustration!
I also decided to do a quick animated version by moving the illustration elements around.
This is a gif showcasing my process.
And here's the process in image progression form:
The initial sketch to figure out the composition.
I cleaned up the line art for Elfno and the background.
I cleaned up the line art for the bear and stuffing.
I added some base colors.
I added shading to all of the elements.
I blurred some elements and added some action lines to indicate motion.
And the final version, where I lightened and blurred the action lines a bit.
