7B
is my She Drew That and Strangebeast residency program project. In September me and two other aspiring female directors worked on our short films supported and guided by the awesome people at Strangebeast. You can read more about the initiative and the people behind it in this awesome article cartoon brew wrote here
Little Artist has a block. When her trusty pencil let’s her down all seems hopeless but her amazing future self comes to the rescue!
I'll show a bit of making of here. First there was a storyboard! I like doing the colour blocking in this stage to see how everything works together. This makes it really easy to keep the colour scheme consistent when building the assets.
I then developed the main character - since she had to work in 2D as well as 3D i kept her shapes simple and her silouette clean. As you can see in the render of the 3D side characters i followed my colour script pretty precisley.
Here are some WIP of the 3D workflow. I build my characters with boxmodelling and extruded splines. The arms and legs are animatable with bend deformers.
My goal was to combine 2D after effects animation with 3D elements. One challenge where the arms in the POV of the character. They just didn't look right rigged in 2D. Luckily Cinema 4D has this render effect setting called 'Sketch and Toon' that gives 3D animated elements a flat look and feel.
I then had to figure out how to get my character into the sheet of paper. A part which i conveniently had skipped in my storyboard and animatic. Here you can see the stages of figuring out how that could work. It's always good to find the key poses first before adding detail.
For fast moves you can get away with a lot! -hehe- here are some smearframes from the moment the character gets sucked into the paper sheet.
So yeah! This is my stuff. All in all it was a super fun and rewarding time. And if anyone ever asks you what's it like to work as an animator - show them my film!
