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Everything put together in TV paint with colors and backgrounds  

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still images

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Exporting film & final look  ・ヘ・

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Cleaning-up animation

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rough animation wip

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in-progress painting of a background

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Budget

Equipment/Softwares used

ADOBE SUITE ~ 300$ Adobe Photoshop CC 2018 Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015 Adobe After Effects CC 2015

AVID Pro Tools

TVPaint Animation

WACOM CINTIQ HD 13″ ~ 1300$

Estimation of the numbers of hours spent on tasks

Rough Animation  ~50-60 hours Clean up  ~20 hours Coloring   ~ 10 hours Sound Editing  ~ 12 hours Background Artworks  ~ 7-8 hours *very roughly estimated hours

Post-production services: 

Final Sound Mix by Tim Horlor Color Correction by myself.

Other services

Tuition ~3000$

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Early rough sound edit on Premiere for the animatic.

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Where the animation gets done

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Director’s statement (SHORT)

The Cycle is the story of a mysterious giant creature who nurtures an unhealthy berry back to health but things do not go as expected. My animations are often inspired by food and have an unfortunate ending so my focus was to make it humorous but still dark.

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Director’s statement (LONG)

The story of The Cycle is about an unhealthy berry who gets saved by a mysterious Giant. The Giant nurtures him back to health but his intentions are not as wonderful as they seem to be. The Cycle’s style is inspired by recent animated television series: it is an animated short with a simplistic design that is emotional but also whimsical. 

For the visuals, the process of making this animated short involved looking through different types of background that would work well with the character designs: at first, the backgrounds’ design looked more flat but were change into a more painterly look to give more depth. As an aesthetic choice, since the characters have a very simple style and color, they stand out more against the backgrounds. Although the film is designed to have an overall cute visual look, it plays with the expectations of the viewer in the second half and becomes a “darker” film.

The idea behind the film is to lead the viewer awry by making the audience think the creature is a “gentle giant”.

In many of my films or storyboard ideas produced at MHSoC , the motivation is to find a way to make the film humorous despite having an unfortunate ending. The ideas usually come through brainstorming random situations associated with food.

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early design

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Production schedule

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Music

In the rough animatic, there was not as much music playing throughout the film but after seeing the edit by Bruce Fagen where he put more music to emphasize the emotion, it made the film less “empty” so I used his suggestion to use more music as well.

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Characters

When we had the guest speaker, Malcolm Sutherland, he had mentioned that he thought the two creatures were the same but one of them was the elderly one and I thought that was interesting. Originally, the giant creature was inspired by white radishes while the berry was simply just…a  berry. After thinking about what he said during that week, I thought it would be darker if they were indeed the same type of vegetable. This decision had also influenced the characters’ colors, they would remain similar with minimal differences. For example, the leaf on their heads would be a slightly different shade of green while the other berry in one of the final scenes would have some facial differences to make sure that the audience realizes it is a different one.

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Storyboard/Animatic

During the early storyboard and animatic development, the giant creature had less character: he originally did not comfort the berry before eating him and just walked away towards another bush after doing so. After some feedback, it was said to possibly raise a question in the audience of leaving things unresolved. In the final version, it was altered so that the berry’s unhappiness was resolved: the creature would pat him on the head to comfort him until the berry smiled again. 

Additionally, the final scenes also changed: instead of eating the berry right away after being comforted and having the creature looking around for its next victim, the creature would throw the berry in his hand with a lack of interest and then notice something in the distance: another bush with another sad berry. He will then finish the “job” by eating the berry but not without making the audience hear the berry’s scream one last time. 

Finally, instead of seeing the creature walk towards the other bush, we will hear his footsteps fading away to suggest that he is going to his next meal in the credits. These additional scenes are to give the audience a better view on the relationship of the two creatures and to make them think: “oh, maybe he isn’t going to eat him after all” while also making the final scenes seem like less of a rush of things happening all at once.

In the scene where the creature first tries to eat the berry, there is an added scene in the final version where we see the berry being brought to the creature mouth from the perspective of inside the giant’s mouth. This is to make the scene feel more gruesome for the berry and the audience.

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Background

During the production of the film, I had also decided to change how my backgrounds were going to look. After doing the animation test, I did not like the way it looked: the background was flat and had black lines outlining the surroundings (the tree, grass and clouds). It had looked far too simplistic for my liking and despite that my film was simple and straightforward, I wanted the backgrounds to be more detailed. To find what I wanted them to look like in the end, I looked up some images of forests to have a better palette for the colors of the forest. Finally, in the post-production of the film, the backgrounds are not too simple and busy. They look more painterly than what it looked like originally in the animation test and contrast well with the characters.