eli
SPLUDE
NOT LIKE YOU
The final task of the Motion Design track at Ringling has us creating a senior thesis film. From a few suggested project types, I chose to tell a personal story about my own internal experience of the world, drawing from my passion for biology as well In the interest of time, seniors are suggested to make their films a minute long, much to the chagrin of a serial rambler like myself.
Software: After Effects Deliverables: 1920x1080 Short Film, ~1 Minute
01
Sketch It Out
As with any project, the place to start is always with trying a bunch of variations quickly. I put forward 3 thesis concepts to my thesis advisor and classmates to select from, and included some of my sketched out ideas. Being who I am, none of these are about humans, focusing on some animal or another, imagined or otherwise.
Whining about some sad sack snail wasn't the only film I pitched at the beginning of my final semester. I proposed another, about finding belonging thematically similar to Not Like You with greater contrast in tone, going from horror to triumph and hope.
Not Like You focuses on a snail with a reversed shell serving as a metaphor for a feeling of emotional distance. The snail initially has a "not like other girls" mentality, feeling a sense of superiority for their lack of conformity. But then, the protagonist spirals into a crisis over emotional strengths they see in others that they lack themselves. The snail eventually decides that if they cannot be like everyone else, there is nothing else to be but a better version of themself.
Click on the gallery for more!
Descending Star takes place in the world of a personal project I had been developing on and off for a few months when production started. The plot follows a tall, bug-eyed stranger living in a village of smaller, less creepy-looking counterparts. When a home is attacked by a monster from the forest, the protagonist pursues it into the night. Returning victorious, he is met with new appreciation by the villagers, where he finds value in his new role in the community.
I'm still very passionate about the world and ideas for this film, there's much more to say in the gallery.
Critterlog was something different. Rather than a film, the idea here was to create a digital field guide to the world of one of my sci-fi projects. Created in Rive, it would be interactable in real time, like a virtual book. The main attraction of each page would be an animated illustration of the creature in question, separating the drawing into pieces that could be rigged in rive and animated like a paper puppet. Each one would also have a series of collapsible boxes of facts about each animal.
There's actually not much in the gallery this time but you should click it anyway.
I also proposed a thesis concept that wasn't a film at all, but was instead an excuse for me to have somewhere to feed the evil monster inside me that forces me to make up new animals.
02
Best Foot Forward
Once Not Like You was selected as the approved film, I had to iron out how it would look. The design of the snails was important to confirm as soon as possible. And as expected, it was a worthy challenge to come up with a look that both I and my professor could be satisfied with.
I've always been something of a maximalist, but with the timeline of the film there was no way to achieve that and still finish all the animation that needed to be done, so I used this as a chance to practice more simplistic character designs. Some were hand illustrated, but the simple, easy to animate vector drawings won out.
The first style frames explore different render styles, including one that would have been hand drawn!
03
Slow and Steady
A design direction was selected, meaning that the fast and loose stage of ideation was over with, it was time to move on to more consistent style frames, as well as final storyboards and an animatic.
While I was still working out how the snails would be rendered, I also needed to produce some idea of what scenes would really look like. Strongly textured paper was always a central part of the aesthetic of the film, it feels more like something you could touch with your hands, helping an audience connect with it. It also lends a storybook feeling to the story, which feels like an appropriate way to deliver the themes I wanted to tackle.
Style frames and character designs were being revised, but in the meantime I developed an animatic as well. I'd come to the pitch meeting with a sketched outline, so I already knew how the plot would progress, though many of the compositions were far from final My peers loved the voiceover I recorded, so it would actually change very little through the entire production process. All that theater and YouTube recording really paid off!
04
Crawling Onward
One more round of critique later,the visual style would reach its final form. The snails were softened and had their proportions exaggerated. The difference between our snail and the others was settled as well, bearing a square one rather than the round shells of the other snails around them.
Even with the simple designs of these snails, I wanted to take the time to create a rig in After Effects while constructing style frames. In the end, the only thing affected would be the eyes, attaching the vertexes of the eyestalks or body turned out to be more trouble than they were worth. However, being able to control the eyes without clicking into the composition of each snail for each adjustment during the animation phase did save a lot of time in matching eyelines, especially with the erratic movements I would give the eyes of the protagonist.