2D Digital Animation
OFFLINE - A Short Film
This is the culmination of my 3rd year of studying animation. A 4-minute, 2D hand-animated, painted, and composited story I wrote and directed over 10 months.
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Beyond watching the final product, this page is dedicated to showcasing the creative process involved with getting this abitious project off the ground and in its finished state. Expore the pre-production process, stages of animation, and the effort involved in post production to breathe life into this story.
PRE-PRODUCTION
The Script
The idea of the story started before the school semester, developing throughout the first few months of pre-production.
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The task was to create a 30-second short film with full creative freedom, so I figured I should utilize the time. What resulted was a 7-minute script of what would become OFFLINE. With a slower-paced, more fleshed-out narrative that would have seen Ben embark on a similar journey to discover an appreciation for life's quiet moments.
OFFLINE_SCRIPT_DRAFT_V6
OFFLINE_SCRIPT_DRAFT_V2
Teachers and friends were a huge help in learning to condense my script to its most basic, core ideas. Eventually, the script ended up leaning heavily on visual storytelling, with the decision to let the music do the talking. By the time the script was completed, visual development was well under way.
Visual & Music Development
Throughout the gradual improvements to each script version, more musical ideas emerged. Originally, with the 7-minute version of the film, a slower, softer, more classical scoring approach was what I had in mind. A sound that would be gentle, and evolve along with the story and characters. By the time the script was "OFFLINE_SCRIPT_DRAFT_V4", the calm music began to clash with the faster pacing needed to achieve a sub-5-minute story, for the sake of having a finished, somewhat decent-looking film at the end of the year without taking too many shortcuts to hit the deadline. At this point, I decided to scrap all the musical ideas thus far, and started again with the idea for the music to tell the story, as vocally as possible. I figured the best way to convey this would be through a constant beat, which viewers could subconsciously use as a pacesetter. I enjoy polyrhythms and syncopated time signatures, so I started by figuring out how to work some of those into the score while still being easily digestible to a general audience.
Press play to listen to some early music ideas
Offline_TestTrack_1
Offline_TestTrack_2_WindSynths
As the musical ideas continued to develop, so did the visual style of the film. I started with the star of the film, Ben. I worked on creating a very simple, easy-to-replicate style as I knew I would be drawing the character thousands of times, being 2D hand animated. The decision itself to make the film traditional 2D animation, as opposed to the more mainstream 2D puppet animation featured in the majority of animation productions in Western media, was solely from the confidence I have in animating timing and spacing completely freely. I work faster, more accurately, and overall more efficiently with animating by hand. So as the character and his look continued to improve and find its form, the script had gotten the thumbs up from my instructors, and I was happy with where it was at. From here I moved onto storyboarding to begin to properly culminate the collection of work done up to this point, from the style guide, to the musical ideas and the script itself.
Early Exploration & Developments
Beat Board
Storyboarding
By the time the script was "OFFLINE_SCRIPT_DRAFT_V4", the layout of the story was clear. I began to create a small beat board to nail down the look of each scene and the feel each moment had in progressing the story. These scenes were key in developing the rest of the storyboard, as I was able to use the major beats as "key poses" for the pacing, only needing to fill the spaces in between, essentially transitioning from one beat to another, as you would with animating. The final version of the storyboard would be showcased as an animatic, a moving storyboard with timing and sound as prominent elements to better convey the story as it will play out in final.
Final Storyboard/Animatic
Throughout the rest of first semester, I completed the script, design pack, and final storyboard, which was presented to the class and another instructor who gave great feedback and advice on starting production.
PRODUCTION
Background Painting
I knew that there wouldn't be much in terms of flashy action or any grand spectacle throughout the story, so I figured I should create some more detailed, vibrant, and lively backgrounds to give the story a visually pleasing variety of settings. There was only one issue... I don't know how to paint.
Early Layout Test
While I have a good grasp on values, my colour theory needed revisiting at the time. Thankfully, I had planned for this learning hurdle, as the majority of the pre-production work was complete or deep in development before the school year even started. As I was ahead of schedule, I was able to start learning and practicing background painting while creating the animatic, which gave me an extra month to reach a point where I could quickly produce a finished background in a few days, with some level of quality.
Drag left and right to view the before and after!
Early Render
Final Render
Many backgrounds were built up progressively, establishing the larger area, then narrowing to detail. Some backgrounds were changed down the line to better reflect the environment's purpose in the story, making any symbolism easy to understand.
Adapting each panel from the animatic into a fully realized background was a great opportunity to review and identify all the structural and perspective errors in the animatic, which, admittedly, was quite rushed. About halfway through the background painting process, I started to understand the value of using reference as opposed to relying on a mental library. With that, I saw many flaws in the finished renders as well, which were left uncorrected from a lack of time. This upward car interior background has a very disproportionate car that I wrote off as "style" too early on.
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Other backgrounds maintained the same composition, yet went through more reworks to tweak the scene. This one, for example, saw different variations throughout the pipeline to create a more harmonious environment. Moving from left to right, a clear progression was made to correct many initial errors; however, looking at it now there are many adjustments I would make to improve the scene even more, mainly with the large tree on the right, and the illusion of depth for the background forest.
Altogether, 34 finished backgrounds were created within two months. For what the film was shaping up to be, I was satisfied with the progress I made on developing a new skill and the results it brought. With the backgrounds completed, I was now free to move on to the giant task that would take up the rest of the school year... Animation.
Animation Process
When I initially planned out the whole pipeline of this project, I tried to give myself more time where I was less experienced, to essentially add a buffer period for when things eventually fell behind schedule, such as the background painting and initial layouts. These were the areas of focus throughout the entirety of the pipeline to further my skills. Animation was not one of these.
Some Personal Animations
I decided very early on that this project would not be one to further my animation skills, but to put what I have on display to complement the improvements in digital painting. I am strong with my timing and spacing, and adopt an unconventional way of key animating, in that I work better with straight-ahead animation rather than pose-to-pose. I find this allows me to better meld the animation principles and get tangible results in motion, rather than plotting the entirety of a movement and making minor changes along the way. I feel this gives my characters a sort of "improvisational" manner to their movements, as it would be with live action film and actors on a set. Additionally, this also lends itself better to working on twos, threes, and especially on fours.
Favourite Shots
Using industry-standard software and tools was super fun as I am very familiar with the shortcuts, hidden features, and overall usability that I'm sure will come in handy down the road. Luckily, there were no hurdles with the animation process, as that was the fun part. Although the short film was shot in a very static, uninvolved manner, I tried to make the character's actions more lively and give a better sense of the inner personalities. While there weren't any hurdles with the animation itself, the end of the school year was rolling in, meaning summatives and final assignments that took away time for the short film. This ultimately led to taking shortcuts in the animation and having some shots be very simplified, yet still allowing bigger moments to be fluid and more robust. This was most notable when animating the sloth, where portraying a slow-moving object means more individual frames, and less overall movement over a longer period of time. I got around this by animating on eighths (new drawing every 8 frames), which resulted in very choppy, unfinished animation. If I were to make any changes, it would start with those scenes.
Overall, the animation complements the background art and simple visual style enough to entertain an audience for 4 minutes. What really keeps audiences engaged and moves the story along, offering an audible introspection on the characters and environments, was the music.
Full FInal Track
Scoring the Film
After many iterations of finding the right sound for the film, the score was nearing its final version. Many different individual ideas were combined to create the 4-minute track featured in the short film. Portraying the wind through a combination of instruments allowed me to mix it with the rest of the score, adding small motifs throughout to symbolize the whimsy of the forest and how it guides Ben's epiphany.
With the many digital music libraries and live instruments at my disposal, I was able to experiment with different arrangements and voicing through my DAW of choice. In this image you can see a few of the patterns I used to arrange the different instruments .
BONUS
Below are some of the individual instruments throughout a piece of the score, showcasing the different layers that went into giving the final track its distinctive characteristics.
Full FInal Track
Overall, production went smoothly, although slightly rushed. I enjoyed the traditional 2D hand animation and getting to interpret the characters however I wanted. Seeing the characters come to life and interact with the environment was very fun, and it only excited me more for future projects and how I can grow in this craft. Now that the challenging, time-consuming portion of this project was completed, I moved on to piecing all the parts of the puzzle together in post-production.
POST-PRODUCTION
Editing
In film production, editing is the second make-or-break stage, after production itself. You can have the absolute best takes and scenes, but if they don't flow together to seem like a series of events playing out, or the shots cut so quickly that nothing has time to breathe, the film is lost. For this short film, editing would be crucial in selling the music's involvement with the story, as well as setting the pace.
I was looking forward to editing the final film as soon as I created the animatic. I find I'm able to shut off my brain, throw on a movie, and piece each shot together, matching moments with the music seamlessly. The entire process only took a few days, and then the final cut was completed! Or so I thought...
As with any project, the first final cut is always the one I learn from the most, as it becomes very apparent what is lacking, and what needs to be added to truly step away from the project.