For this project, we worked in a team of 5 (me, Sophie, Anushka, Zeng Zeng and Ceren) to create a 30-second animated short film. Though we spent the first week thoroughly developing an idea inspired by the Faustian bargain: a dangerous creature luring a desperate prince into a trap, that idea was ultimately rejected. Though I think it was a promising story and it slightly hurt to part from it, I do understand why our tutors said it was too cliché and I can see what they meant by it feeling more like “a scene from a movie” rather than a self-contained short.

These are the characters I designed for the ultimately scrapped idea.

Then, we decided to go with a simpler story which builds from an entertaining premise rather than a well-known storyline. Our story would feature a small gnome who unsuspectingly orders a mushroom-making kit, only for the mushroom to grow into a scary mushroom creature!

Zeng Zeng built on my original design to make the mushroom – creature even scarier.

When designing the main character, a small flowery gnome named Phool, we went through many iterations. We wanted him to feel bubbly and happy, approachable and cute – a direct contrast to the frightening sharp-teethed creature. We discussed colour palettes as a group, and when I designed Phool as a character, I took great inspiration from Cartoon Saloon’s work. As a group, we had collectively decided to mimic this whimsical and enchanting art style with their geometric shape language, magical swirls and natural motifs. It looks like a storybook come to life.

Here are some of my pencil sketches for Phool’s design.

Phool’s colour scheme, however, was not quite right still so I played with the colours and showed the team, who all agreed that this should be the final design. This colour palette is autumnal, warm and cosy, befitting a happy little gnome who lives in a little flower shop.

During one of meetings when I was ill, the other team members created rough storyboards.

Zeng Zeng’s Storyboard:

Ceren’s Storyboard:

I combined a few of these ideas, along with my own to create the first very rough version of the animatic in Storyboard Pro. It was difficult to fit everything into the very limited time frame of 30 seconds, but thankfully the story was simple enough to be reduced and clearly told in such a short time. 

Our tutors Jess and Chris gave some useful feedback. Jess helped with a lot of composition and helped improve the storytelling of each shot. For example when Phool gets picked up by the creature in the first storyboard, he is quite high in the frame so when the creature’s hand reaches down, he doesn’t have far to go up. Jess suggested we put him lower and this created a much better balance. She also suggested changing Phool’s positioning when he leans down to collect the broken bits of mushroom. He was too far to the right, leaving a lot of space on the left which created a false impression that there was something behind him. Fixing this helped the story. Chris also gave interesting suggestions, one such was to remove the text from the box and focus purely on visual storytelling so I redesigned the box by adding some happy mushroom logos. 

In the first animatic, when Phool carries the box inside, he is struggling with its weight. I realised that this struggle tainted his happy moment and did not fit – Phool’s shock and fear should contrast with his unbridled joy at the beginning. So I replace his struggling steps with cheerful skips. 

Please follow the link below to see all 3 iterations of the storyboarding and animatic process on padlet: 

https://padlet.com/artslondon/out-of-your-head-c81r1u8vhu1uenbs/wish/wKmOZ56o4oEnWzMA

After our project and animatic were fully greenlit, we decided to split the workload. I would be fully animating 14 seconds and cleaning up and colouring two of the shots I animate. I would also be compositing.

I decided to work in Toon Boom Harmony for this project. Though it was my first time using the software, it was not too difficult since I only needed to understand its basic frame-by-frame features for hand-drawn animation and none of its complex rigging capabilities. I put all of my rough animation in the same Padlet page.

I did all the animation, clean-up and colour for the first scene, where Phool is beyond excited to receive the mushroom-making kit he had ordered. I really liked adding the cute little sparkle effects for his eyes. Additionally, I used shape layers in After Effects to create a strong, atmospheric rim lighting around Phool. I composited everything with the lovely background Sophie had drawn.

For the second shot, I created a parallax effect by incorporating the 3D features in After Effects. I did the animation here and Anushka did the clean-up and colour. The background and foreground move at different rates to create a sense of depth.

I also fully animated the third shot, did the tie down and Anushka completed the clean-up and colour in Toon Boom. This scene was very tricky and took me a week to animate since it is over five seconds long. I took inspiration from the seven dwarfs when Phool’s hat flies off his head in surprise! Additionally, I used After Effects’ particles system to create the little explosion that happens when the mushroom pops up. Simple drop shadow effects were added for Phool’s highlights.

Here I worked on the clean up and colour of shot 4 where Phool reaches down to pick up the dropped spray bottle. I did some FX animation for the first time as the mushroom grows ominously.

This project was certainly a huge learning experience for all of us. There are many things I would do differently. To begin, I realised just how important communication is and how every small, tiny piece of information should be clearly stated, otherwise confusion can easily occur. For example, different group members chose different colours for the spray bottle. This was such a small prop that we completely forgot to establish its colour scheme! Another thing that we would need to do next time is collectively discuss the animation. For example, when the mushroom’s creature’s shadow first appeared, I assumed it would be obvious that a big shadow creeping up would have a slow ominous movement. When the other team member animated it, they gave it a bouncy, sudden motion which was completely different to what I had expected! The most important lesson I learned is to be super clear, discuss everything and don’t assume the others know what you are thinking. There were other small areas of the project which I thought were small choices and forgot to tell the others but led to misunderstandings.
Next time, we would also have to use a shot list and keep track of how each shot is progressing. Though we had a PowerPoint which outlined weekly roles, it would have been useful to be able to view the production timeline as a whole.
Additionally, since this project had quite a tight time limit, we didn’t have enough time to do pencil tests, style guides or even character sheets! We paid a grave price for missing out on these! It would have been much more helpful if we had these and would have allowed us to have better consistency too!

View the finished short film here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6X3zGuR1EQ

For this last rotation I tried a new form of animation, which I had never worked with before. Stop motion.
We began by exploring a new material, cardboard, and to construct various faces from it. This was very fun and I created three different iterations of mask-like faces.

I particularly liked the owl-like appearance of the second mask, with almond-shaped and upturned eyes, a long flat nose and little circles for the cheeks.

After this initial experiment, we were put into groups of 3 to construct a puppet which could be manipulated by two people in order to be used as both a traditionally manipulated puppet and a stop motion puppet. We chose to create a human character, though ended up using one of my initial masks as its face to create an uncanny look. Our puppet, who we’ve named Gavin, has a rectangular body with bendable limbs, four fingers, a mask-like face and cardboard dreadlocks.

All of the stop motion experiments can be viewed on Padlet:
https://padlet.com/artslondon/stop-motion-a5z7pn36adhtkah7

We created several experiments using low-key lighting and a software called Dragonframe. For these initial experiments, we struggled with timing as everything ended up looking much faster than we had thought while adjusting the puppet. We also played around with light temperature – how warmer orange and colder, bluer lights affected the mood of our scene.
Then, we proceeded to play around with the technique of pixilation. We filmed some of our group members interacting with Gavin as though he were a puppet come to life. These achieved some remarkably interesting results! In both of these short animations, Gavin gets fed up with his pesky human companion and decides to pummel them with little cardboard fists.

Then on the second week of the rotation, we were given the task of creating a 30-second short film with the theme Metamorphosis. Our puppet had to undergo some sort of transformation.
We actually did little planning for this animation and wanted to experiment and see where the process took us. However, we knew we wanted Gavin to feel overwhelmed and trapped, then transform as a result of this. We used pixilation by involving our own hands and proffering Gavin various objects , most notably money, which he rejects with an adamant shake of the head.
I think the beginning is particularly successful as we played with shadows of our hands to create the impression that Gavin is constantly surrounded, giving context to his consequent transformation. We then used masking tape to create a cocoon around him and emphasising his feelings of entrapment. Finally, we went with the traditional symbol of rebirth and starting anew as Gavin transforms into a butterfly (using replacement animation) and flies away, finally free from the materialistic and shallow attitudes of the world he experienced.

Lastly, we tried replacement animation, a different form of stop motion. We were given three shapes: a circle, a square and a triangle. Then, we had to cut out a series of shapes which would allow these shapes to morph into each other. I preferred this form of stop motion to posing puppets as I thought it gave me more control in how the animation turned out. I really liked this technique.
This animation can also be viewed on the Padlet page.

We were given the task of creating a short, 30-second animatic conveying a conflict of some sorts. Though we had a range of scenarios to choose from, I decided to come up with my own scenario. In my story, two best friends meet up in a tavern to celebrate their long-lasting friendship, only for it to shatter the moment they realise they fancy the same woman.

My initial goals for the project were the following:
Learn basics of Storyboard Pro
Utilise a wide range of shots in my storyboard
Have a clear narrative that engages the viewer

Choreograph a convincing comedic fight scene

I wrote a rough script (not properly formatted) as a word document. Some tiny tweaks were made later, but the initial script was very similar to the final one.

After this, we were given several post-it notes to do thumbnails on. I really enjoyed this and it allowed me to explore story beats, camera angles and compositions all very freely. I drew on about 80 post-it notes, generating as many ideas as possible which I would then refine.
After this, I took photos of all of the best drawings and edited the animatic together in Premier Pro. This was quite simple as I had experience with Da Vinci Resolve and other video editing programs before.
While I was doing this, I had to find voice actors to deliver the dialogue. My brother and Favor did an absolutely excellent job and I am very grateful for their help in bringing these characters to life! Additionally, I tried experimenting with sound design, however quickly realised I would struggle to create convincing sounds of crashing without causing damage, so decided to look online on sites such as freesounds.org and BBC sound effects, which I could use.

Below you can see the first version of my animatic consisting of only photographed post-it notes.

For this project, I wanted to challenge myself by incorporating a fight scene, something I had never done before. My strength lies in displaying emotion, not in dynamic action sequences so this was very tricky to come up with. I looked at several movies with this type of comedic fighting including the fight scene between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones’ Diary as well as fight scenes in old Bud Spencer films.
To challenge myself even further, I wanted to make this animatic fully digitally in Storyboard Pro, a program I had never used before. The interface was relatively easy to get used to, though adding and modifying camera motions could get a little tricky and tedious.

I also created brief character explorations for both Hubert and Stefan, whose main distinctive features will be their hair colours since their designs aren’t fleshed out for this animatic. I also did some sketches of Henrietta (the girl they are fighting over) even though she only appears for a few brief shots.

Below you can see the final animatic, created fully digitally and incorporating dynamic camera moves and different shots. I am particularly pleased with the clarity of my storytelling – nobody had any issues in understanding what was going on. I think I succeeded in creating an engaging narrative with a very obvious conflict. Nevertheless, the most obvious area I need to address is the length of my animatic, which is 1 minute and 47 seconds whereas the initial brief suggested 20-30 seconds. Though I think my animatic is well-paced, I could have focused more on the conflict itself, perhaps cutting the dialogue at the beginning and starting with Stefan noticing Henrietta and getting straight into the fight. The scene could also have ended with the “trunk shot” of Henrietta blinking surprisedly at the two guys to cut time.

This rotation followed straight after the character design one. Here, we would be creating a 5-10 second short looping animation to display the personality of the character we had previously developed.
I had come up with a little back story for Harold before. His house is constantly haunted by pesky ghosts but, being a rather grumpy old man, Harold will not put up with these troublesome ghosts! I wanted this animation to reflect his old age, but also his grumpiness.

I decided that the short looping animation would show Harold, lethargically and sleepily eating his morning porridge while steam rises from his coffee. This wisp of steam, however, curls upwards and expands until it morphs into a pesky ghost! Harold shoos the ghost away with a threatening swing of his spoon. This animation, I thought, would display his personality well and show an interesting range of emotions on Harold’s face.

Firstly, I started with a range of pencil sketches and key drawings, drawn rather chaotically on scrap pieces of paper. The little thumbnails sketches would be cut out, rearranged then stuck back together. I also added some numbers for potential timing for where each action would take place and how long it might take.

Additionally, I had to create the sound myself. The clatter of the bowl and the thump of the fist were relatively easy to do as foley sounds. The voices were trickier. I tried voicing Harold myself, to express his anger with a grunt and chew in the way old men who have no teeth do. I am not certain that my sound is synched well enough, nor do I think my voice fit his character – next time I would need to find a better cast. The voice of the ghost was much better. I got my mum to sing the ghost’s eerie and melodic squeal, then made the pitch even higher. I definitely succeeded in creating a comedic effect as the ghost’s voice elicited chuckles from the class upon screening.

Because the project’s duration was two weeks, I didn’t have time to colour the animation, though I was able to add in a rough background. Nevertheless, I was also able to add follow through of Harold’s wispy and sparse hair which flows after his head with delayed timing, as well as animating the morphing of the ghost.