MOTIVATION and BACKSTORY
My capstone Tune In originally started as an assignment for another class - The Climb, a short film final for Story for the Screen. When it came time to settle on a capstone idea, I decided to expand on that project and to push it both visually and story-telling wise. Over the past few years, I've been really inspired by short films like MILLENIUM HOUR, Fuelled, and Lackadaisy, and I have always loved telling stories without dialogue. Continuing work on The Climb gave me the opportunity to develop my 2D and storytelling skills while pursuing a project I was already passionate about, and through this process I've been able work on a little bit of everything.
PIPELINE
My project consisted of four main parts: the story and animatic, the room environment layout, a prop design, and the character turnaround. While working on these things overlapped a little bit, I tried to focus on one thing at a time.
Initially, I hadn't planned to rework the story, but after some feedback and having people watch my previous progress, it was clear that the rework was necessary. This and the animatic were my first tasks, since they were central to the development of everything else. My general workflow for the animatic was to create a soundless animatic, get feedback on boards, pacing, and the story in general, then to go and redo the animatic and boards based on that feedback. For particular milestones, I added scratch sound, which would also get redone based on feedback.
I started my layout drawing in the middle of working on the animatic and story, and the prop design and character turnaround followed soon after. It was important for the environment to be built to facilitate the story, and for the character and prop to fit that environment. My general process for these 2D deliverables was to create a rough sketch with loose shading to get feedback on, move onto line work, then color, and then shading and lighting, incorporating feedback along the way. Although I was making revisions to the animatic up until the last week, my 2D deliverables did not have to change much in response since the major story beats were already settled on.
MAJOR STEPS
Story and Animatic
While the core theme of my story stayed the same across versions, almost everything else around it changed. Getting to the current version was a process of cutting out anything unnecessary or confusing, giving more personality to the characters and their environments, and emphasizing the character's journey. Reworking the second act was a key development to making the story successful. Just making the film longer gave much more time for things to develop and breathe. The Climb - this project's first iteration, made for a different class - is shown below.
The diagram below goes further into some of the visual and story changes that were made between The Climb and Tune In's current version.
Room Layout
As my story developed, my mentors helped me realize that the room is as much a character as the fox, and should tell the story of its inhabitant. I nailed down the vibes of the room fairly quickly in a sketch, and the rest of the process was creating and refining a new version, and getting feedback along the way.
Prop Design
My prop's development went rather quickly, since I already had a lot of references and was familiar with the style I was working in. I played with a few different shapes, but ultimately stuck with the shape I already liked. Emphasizing and playing with the shape was a primary focus for this deliverable.
Character Turnaround
I knew from the beginning that I wanted to be the main character to be a fox, both because the red/orange color scheme would help them stand out and because of them commonly being characterized as shy, solitary creatures. I struggled with the character's shapes for a while, but things really fell into place once I gave them a long, noodly body, played up their personality, and started studying Cartoon Saloon's various character art styles.
CHALLENGES and TECHNICAL INSIGHTS
Color and lighting in particular were key challenge areas for me during this project during the 2D deliverable portion. Building a cohesive color scheme for the room layout was tricky, but what was more tricky was trying to convey emotion and feeling through it. The room needed to be cold to convey the character's isolation - so lots of blues - but also needed warmth, since it still is their safe place. The solution for this was to use a lot of blues, and to mix in a range of muted browns, yellows, and off-whites. I tried to keep other colors within the yellow-green to orange-red range to keep everything tied together. A green exclusion layer was added over everything to further tie everything together. Figuring out the perfect color balance was a lot of trial and error, and a lot of creating small color blocking tests where I masked out the major shapes of the room to see how different color schemes played together in the space.
The color choices played into the lighting and shading of the room as well. Light from the outside world is a sickly blue, as is the light from the bathroom. This draws attention to the warm orange glow of the desk lamp - which is the character's safe spot, and highlights the vinyl on the desk that is so important to the story. While just figuring out the lights' colors was itself a test, actually drawing out the rooms lights and shadows was itself a challenge. I did my best to imagine the 3D space myself and how the light would bounce around the room, but with three light sources and so many items, it was a difficult time. I helped myself by making a rough 3D whitebox in Blender of the room's major shapes, and put some lights down in the main areas I needed. This was a huge help, and gave me some new fun, realistically plausible new light and shadow shapes to play with. My favorite outcome of this was the window light slanting across the refrigerator, which was much more visually interesting than what I was initially working with.
FINAL VISUAL RESULTS
Final Story and Animatic
Final Room Layout Illustration
Final Prop Design
Final Character Design and Turnaround
CONCLUSION
Overall, I'm really happy with how this project came out. The beginning was a bit rough, and I considered completely scrapping it at a few points, but with the help of feedback and particularly my mentors, it really turned around. It's lightyears away in quality from The Climb now, and I'm very satisfied with that. Seeing the story change and grow has been very fulfilling. I have also learned a lot about visual polish and industry standards this semester, in addition to how to tell a satisfying, visually interesting story. Pushing my ability to stylize was another huge takeaway from this project, and it's something I'll be focusing a lot on in my work going forward.
I do think that I struggled with time a lot this semester, and I had trouble being decisive about what my deliverables would be - my mentors ultimately helped me settled on these four. Focusing my scope, being realistic about my speed as an artist, and sticking better to a schedule would probably have helped me work a lot better, and wouldn't have led to me doing so many things last-minute.
Though I'll be taking a break from the project for a bit, I do plan to continue it with another room illustration and some character designs, and maybe someday the whole short! I would like to improve my skills before I get to that point, and I'm already thinking about the possibility of using a 2D/3D hybrid method to make the finished film.
SPECIAL THANKS
Mentors: Sam Woodfin and Samantha Land
Instructor: Caleb Kicklighter
Grad Teaching Assistant: Kathryn King
Monday Capstone Group
Friends and Family
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