SketchBound

Production blog for short film to be showcased at FUSE 2025

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Welcome to our Production Blog!

“SketchBound” is a fun, feel-good, animated short film. It follows Email, a lonely middle schooler who struggles at a new school until she finds friendship through creating art and forming an Art Club. This film leans into an exaggerated and hand-drawn style in order to emulate an actual middle school artist.

On this blog, me and my team will be posting concept art and production updates for our short film to be showcased at Bradley University's FUSE 2025 event. We look forward to showing you our work!

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OUR TRAILER!

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FUSE 2025 - Our Film!!!!!!

On April 25-26th we had the satisfying pleasure of finally showing off all our hard work! (along with @orionandthehare and the rest of the senior films). Six months of working ultimately ending in a two day showcase event with over 2000 attendees! (If you would like to see the full film please DM!!)

It was so heartwarming to hear how our silly lil film about weird art kids touched so many people. The positive reception was so much more than I could have hoped. It is so incredibly satisfying when your art reaches the right audience.

I was blessed with such an incredible team to bring this all to life, and I hope they are as proud of themselves as I am of them <3

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Doodle VFX

With our film finished and final event preparations happening, there's only one more aspect of production to talk about: one of the more experimental parts of our film, the Doodles!

From early concepting, we knew we wanted to have little doodles like the ones many young artists make during class instead of doing their work. They could be an indicator of emotion or ideas.

As we were coming up with other club members, we were also deciding on the kinds of things these kids would draw. Things like a Warrior Cats kid or a gamer, or Bink with his muse being his kitty.

Then the next step was to figure out how we wanted them to appear in the film directly. Many tests were done, both with different brushes and animation styles. We ultimately decided on a hand-drawn, real-time drawn look,

And finally, here's what it looks like in a finished scene! Everything is coming together so nicely, we can't wait to fully share our film with everyone!

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Music Development

With about a week left until the final film is due, we're working on any finishing touches to make this the best it can be! And with that, I asked our Music Guy to take over the blog post this week. Take it away Blayne!

"Hi! I'm Blayne! I'm the entire Music and Sound team for SketchBound! I've never written music for animation before, so naturally I went in super confident that everything was going to work out and not at all terrified! I think it turned out okay??? I've learned a lot from the team, and I'm so happy with how everything is wrapping up! I've grown a lot as a composer from this experience, and I can't wait to use my new powers for evil!

I took a listen to the reference tracks the the team gave me to get a start on figuring out what I wanted to write. the direction I was given was to write something that emulated late-90s early 2000s cartoons, think Ed Edd and Eddy and Hey Arnold! My original plan before seeing any of the storyboards was to make the music sound like kids were playing it on makeshift instruments (like the drums being pots and pans). I still want to use that idea for something but it didn't pan out. I tried throwing a kazoo in for a melody instrument, but you can listen here and discover for yourself why I didn't go with that.

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I threw out the kazoo but I like the melody for the most part, so I moved the project from FL Studio to Cubase and used big boy instruments that weren't .sf2 files (unfortunately). You can kinda see the weird little pile of sound that would eventually become the Official SketchBound OST! This one is very empty, doesn't have much life to it, but eventually it got to the point where the team and I felt that it served it's purpose well!

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And now we have the final product! Feedback from over a dozen people went into this version, so now it's not just my fault if something sounds wrong! I'm super happy with everything considering my inexperience! It feels a lot more alive than before!

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This has been a great way to look back at the evolution of the music! I hope that SketchBound is an overnight success, launching not only our careers but the careers of hundreds of video analyst channels that do SketchBound lore videos! When there is an inevitable SketchBound Friday Night Funkin' mod I'd love to do the music for it! (This one I am actually serious about I'm not joking)."

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March Progress

Updated story reel for our progress from March. With only a couple more shots to finish off, as well compositing slowly making it's way through shots. We're so close to finishing this rough pass, then it's on to final polish before turning in on the 14th. It's almost time and we're so excited to share our finished film with everyone!

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Environment Design

The environment of the school was something that was left up in the air for a bit. We didn't have many artists taking a huge interest in background art, but ones that did took control of the style.

We knew we wanted a looser style, something that would mesh well with a scribbly animation. The choice of color was also something we played around with, before we had settled on the main palette of the characters.

Ultimately we ended up with a limited palette similar to the characters to mesh with but not lose the characters in. Object forms were exaggerated and line art was intentionally sketchy. I appreciate my artists that stepped up to the task of making our film feel like it was taking place in a real environment!

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Character Design - Club Members

What would a film about a school club be without it's Club Members! So how does a team go about creating a lineup like this?

A good chunk of the team was interested in character design during pre-production. A decent sized group was the perfect excuse to let my team leave their mark on our film. But first, Email needed a Bestie.

Expanding on one of the earlier concepts, we decided on this lanky and pointed character to contrast with Email's short and round design. This character would be more outgoing, being the one to reach out to Email first. We really wanted these differences in personality to show in her design. After a round of spitballing, the team named her Shoo.

The next step was to fill out the rest of the cast. Giving my team the guidelines of 1) remembering this is a weird art kid, 2) thinking of what kinds of things they would draw, and 3) attempting to exaggerate proportions, I set them off to create the club!

After the initial concepting, I took the kids and gave them a small makeover to provide cohesion of style throughout the cast. One thing that got left on the cutting room floor was the idea of the color palette changing as the film progressed. It was a cool idea but it was an instance of something being trickier to actually put into practice.

A cast full of silly kids, we had fun coming up with stupid names, despite the original idea of them never being shown in the actual film. From the large pink kid to the rest of the group there is: Bink Bronke Honke, Kris, Gary, Email, Shoo, Dorito, Kit, Pony, and Olivern't.

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Animation Pipeline

The main bulk of our work in these 3 months is the actual animation process. This video goes through each step of the process.

Keyframes - Self explanatory, the key poses of each movement including more exact timing compared to the first animatic.

Roughs - Passed off to another animator, filling in the movement. We decided to animate on 3s instead of 2s.

Sketch Inks - The style of our film means that our line art is intentionally very sketchy and unfinished looking. Going over lines multiple times and leaving fly aways. Our line boils are also hand drawn, giving the final pass a kind of energy that would be missing if we just kept the same frames as the Rough pass.

Colors - The final step, a bit more tedious due to our less clean inking style. But it also contributes to the energy, adding the final touch to looking like someone with an untrained hand animated this.

And a look into our shot organization (a little outdated), filling out down and right as we make our way through them.

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February Progress!

The most recent update to the current animatic. A very rough pass to see how everything is looking together so far.

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Character Design - Email

Something that was important to nail down very early was the designs of our main character. During our first weeks of brainstorming, we created multiple ideas of what our main character could look like. They were going to be introverted and shy, trying to capture the insecure middle schooler look.

Through a vote, we decided on design 6, who we ended up calling Emily/Em.

But she was not nearly as cartoony as we wanted. Our film planned to lean into less realistic colors and environments. It was time to Iterate and Exaggerate.

The main features we decided to prioritize with were her large glasses and nose, hoodie covering her mouth, and shortened stature. With the final pass of refining colors and style, it brings us our official main character design!

However, my favorite part about working in big group projects is the stupid things the team does to have fun with each other. This includes how on a whim, someone called her Email. So obviously we collectively decided her official name was now Email Address.

A silly name for a silly design, the sad wet beast of Email.

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Storyboards and First Animatic

For our pre-production last semester, a lot of the time went towards working on the story. We created a rough outline, and then split up scenes between team members to board. Here are most of the scenes, a little out of order.

Some of these scenes ended up on the cutting room floor as we edited the specific flow and contents of the story. As we reached the beginning of this semester, I created an animatic using the boards refined over the break.

From here, it was time to start locking down shots and organizing tasks- something to be explained in a new post.

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Our Pitch

Our original pitch came from the idea of doodling in class, how art brings people together, and the kind of style we could play with when embracing the (for lack of better word) naivety of a middle school artist.

"SketchBound is a Slice-of-Life, feel-good animation that follows the main character, Emily, throughout her first year at Middle School in a new city as she makes her closest friends through their shared love of art!"

We focused on emphasizing the sketchbook style we wanted to go for, planning to use hand drawn boil lines and doodle VFX that would surround the characters.

Our early character work had a lot more iteration on exaggeration and appeal to go through before ending up where we are now. But you can still see the process of creating a shy teen and how we were going to merge it with our idea of limited colors.

And finally, a look at our environment concepts, which were a little more up in the air due to having more artists interested in character and story work initially. But it was the same idea, creating a setting that was very cartoony and 'imperfect.'

Out of the four films that were pitched, SketchBound was one of the two that were greenlit.

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Welcome to our Production Blog!

“SketchBound” is a fun, feel-good, animated short film. It follows Email, a lonely middle schooler who struggles at a new school until she finds friendship through creating art and forming an Art Club. This film leans into an exaggerated and hand-drawn style in order to emulate an actual middle school artist.

On this blog, me and my team will be posting concept art and production updates for our short film to be showcased at Bradley University's FUSE 2025 event. We look forward to showing you our work!