#project thoughts

[zoloxolo]

Project Thoughts: Student Film "Heard Somebody Cry" [April 12th 2025]

New semester, new student film to work on!

As I said in my last update, I decided to drop my uncompleted film "Lost and Found" last semester due to the amount of baggage it carried during production. I knew that I wanted to do something a bit more light-hearted and fun for the next one, even if it meant working on something as cringe as an animated music video of my two precious ocs.... a but indulgent, yes, last year was very difficult for me so dont judge.... Unfortunately, because i am using a song from a popular band, i won't be able to enter it into any film festivals. The most i can do is hope my film gets selected for my college's screening and maybe win a single award if the judges like it enough.

Anyways enough blabbering, here is what i have so far!

Lemmie first introduce you to my characters I'm going to be animating! The man in the green sweater is Omar, the other ghostly figure with the beret is Benjamin. Back in 2021 when i was attending CSSSA, I attempted to animate a short film of these two which was gnna be named Acquainting Painting. Looking back after years have passed.... it was very silly of me to think I could finish a 1 minute film in just a week, but I managed to have the storyboard done at the very least. I haven't uploaded the film on youtube yet so maybe sometime in the future I'll be able to link it here, but I aint gnna lie, I am a lil too lazy to find the video. I think the file itself is gone forever from my hard drive failing, but I definitely have the file exported as a mp3.

Here is what Benjamin looks like in human form with his proper colors. This was concept art for his redesign, thus the outdated outfit.

Here is what he's supposed to look like in the final product after adding in the effects, but tbh, I'm still not fully on board with these colors. It's got a nice pallet, but i want him to pop out more in a lighter blue since the setting is going to take place in an art gallery at night. By the time i roll out another update, I'll update his FINAL final look.

And now, for the animation segment!

In total, i wanna say i put in about over 40 hours of work into this since 3 weeks ago. I definitely should've put more work into this segment during that time, I was sorta dilly dallying for a bit. There's a few more boards beyond this, but i wanna wait to show it off after the majority of this segment is animated. It was super hard to animate Benjamin glitching since the only things i have ever animated up until this point has been character acting. I had to watch a lot of aimkid beforehand to study the way she makes her character move. I definitely need to watch more 2d animated movies that aren't disney related and get caught up with the times... but i can't help it, i love animating the Richard Williams way 😵‍💫

That's it for now. Its 8am and I stayed up all night trying to type all of this out. I'll see yall preferably next week.

[angst-fairygodmother]

I want to make a slightly less holiday-centric prompt list for fun Winter/December prompts (or at least, less focused on mostly Christmas-y things) since I can’t seem to find one.

Would anyone else be interested in that? 

(It would probably be all Scenarios or Tropes because I’m bad at coming up with dialogue. Unless someone wants to co-author the list and write some?)

[zoloxolo]

*reappears again*

Heehee, funny update on my final film during last semester, I had a major life event that happened about a week or 2 after the last post. TLDR: I had someone who used to live with me move out, and alotta my stuff ended up being scattered around. By the time things started to settle down, I had one week of the semester left to work on my project. I managed to animate and polish half of it before I turned it in! You can see it here!

I think I did p alright for a first film, but it carried so much turmoil once winter break arrived.

After the new year passed, I spent a few months healing and doing stuff creatively and non creatively. Spending an entire week doing nothing but eating, using the restroom, animating, and sleeping is not for the weak yall, so of course it took awhile to get out of that creative rut after going through what felt like animation boot camp.

At some point, my professors and I got in contact to encourage me to continue working on the film. I agreed, but I ended up changing my mind once classes started back up again. I wanted to work on a small animated music video of my characters from my first failed attempt at a short film, "Acquainting Painting," which is going to be a bit uppity and face paced compared to my last film. I was just about to return to tumblr and continue my "project thoughts" on the new film concept but I ended up having a medical scare that lasted 2 whole weeks, thus a good chunk of time meant for production work gone.

I haven't been able to get into the flow of this new project since I got better, I'm currently behind on class work bc I was sick for so long, but I'm currently revisiting all of my belongings I haven't seen and touched since last semester. Im trying to get back into selling my work at art markets again since making money is a bit of a priority now. Half of the time that was meant for animating will be going into my little art business, but I'm hoping that coming back to my "project thoughts" series will encourage me to power through this new film. As of right now, I have about 86 days until it's due. I promise I'll post again after I'm done sorting my belongings out. XP

[zoloxolo]

Project Thoughts: Thesis Film "Lost and Found" [Oct 22 2024]

here's some progress on my new film!

now i realized imma have to do some voice acting and audio editing unless i can find some audio of a country man yelling. im not looking forward to it but i gotta do what i gotta do. also im legit broke and need to find a way to make like a quick 20 bucks to buy some audio samples that dit perfectly in my film. other than that i just gotta grind away. i really only have until the week of Thanksgiving to get most of this done, i have to leave the country for a bit for vacation and i rlly dont wanna go. 🫠

[zoloxolo]

Project Thoughts: Thesis Film - Acquainting Painting [Sep 19 2024]

Starting today, I'm going to be journaling my thoughts on every personal project I'm actively working on. Not only does this help me keep on track on long-term projects that last more than a month, but I tend to regret not keeping up with a life journal when I was younger. I'll probably make multiple series for future entries on different topics, but for now, my current goal for the next few months is to make a film that can help me break into the industry... or maybe transfer to an art college before getting a job. Whichever comes first.

I would also like to add that this doesn't include projects that break NDA contracts for future jobs I may have in the industry.

Aight so I've been kinda losing sleep thinking about this project, only to soon realize the things I'm trippin out about isn't a big deal.

This is a schedule I created for myself so that i can finish my film on time. Tuesday was the last day in the storyboard phase, and I only have half of it done. I thought I was going to keep the majority of the boards I worked on in CSSSA, but as I was fleshing out the characters in my film's backstory, the more ambitious the film became. When I last worked on the storyboard, I ended up re-imagining the ending and trying figure out how i was going to board the middle part. And with the song im using only being a minute long, it can be challenging to fit a lot of important scenes in a few seconds.

To take my mind off of it, I tried working on one of the backgrounds this morning. It took about an hour just to get the perspective right on the rough draft after much u doing and redrawing. and I think that's when it hit me;

I dont need to have these backgrounds super duper perfect, or make this production feel super high quality. The thing that i need to focus on the most is the frame by frame animation, my dream job. After all, I'm the only person working on it. Maybe it'd be nice directing a short film in the future, but I can't afford to burn out this early in the production.

Other things that are keeping me from working on the film are class assignments that are due every other week, and life... i think it's funny that the most important year of my life ended up being my most traveled year ever, (against my will of course.) There are so many obstacles in my way from getting to where i need to be atm but It'll be so worth it by tye time I look back at this first entry.

[shayesanimation]

Thought on the project so far

Although this has been such a last minute change, I am actually quite happy with the new direction that this project is moving in. I still plan to keep a lot of influence from my original concept, the fact that the animation will be taking place on the body will remain the same and I intend to keep the score the same too. I just want to develop a different set of visual pieces to accompany my idea and be within an art style that I feel more happy producing. 

The idea of the man and the demon to represent the inner battle is something I am quite looking forward to developing, it offers me a lot of artistic freedom to see how different techniques of sketching will best represent each side of the spectrum. I will begin working on sketches and concepts in these coming days. 

[shayesanimation]

Thoughts on the project so far

At this stage in production I’m beginning to have a few mixed thoughts about my project. Although I love the narrative and story concept I’ve put together for my film, I’m not sure if my heart is totally in it. I’m beginning to wonder if getting the continuous shots are going to be as straight forward as I anticipated after doing a couple of basic shots with my rig and realised the angles I planned for are going to be increasingly difficult to capture without extensive camera shake and wobble, not to mention it also needs to be in perfect time with the music. This is all something I will be able to experiment with next week though when I travel back home to film.