I decided to take part in the 48 hour drawing challenge that Cardiff Animation Festival held one week ago with three other animators. I only knew Christina, my tutor, beforehand and the other two team members were someone who is going to study at the Character Animation MA next year and the other someone who already graduated.
The reason to why I decided to take part in this competition is first and foremost that I and super competitive and love pushing myself but also because Christina was the one asking people if they wanted to join and I thought I could learn a lot from being on her team.
Brainstorming the story before going off to storyboards we came to the conclusion that the story was an essential key in this story and that we would keep that in mind throughout the film, possibly compromising other elements in order to be able to tell the story. We then all proceeded onto making storyboards with the intend of merging elements of the story later on.
Together with one other group member, I did character design for the story. My characters eded up too uniform as seen in the third image below but on the other hand I had a strong design of the main character. The other group member on the other hand had versatile side characters, so we merged our characters together, which was also a really good experience using elements of both of our work.
Before starting the competition we wrote down our expectations of we all wanted out of the experience, how much we each planned on working and which areas we excelled in and which areas we didn’t have much experience in. I put down that I wasn’t strong in clean-up and coloring, which were actually two things I ended up doing a lot of as it was a very time consuming activity so I learned incredibly much from the others who showed me the most effective way of doing so.
Christina showed me rather than manually coloring in every frame with a pencil, it would actually be more effective and precise to use the Filled Stroke as seen below. This made so much sense when I started using it but wasn’t something I would initially have thought of myself.
As a team we decided on not cleaning up our rough animation lines but instead coloring the characters with shapes and only drawing inside the shapes to create some definition in the character.
Towards the end we saw that we fell short of time and as a means of problem solving, we decided on now doing the inside lines of some of the shots as we simply wouldn’t be able to finish if we did so. Instead we overlaid the rough animation lines onto the colored shapes as seen below with the two different approaches:
We decided on doing this as we determined beforehand that the story was the most important factor of this animation and as long as we were still able to tell the story, this was the right solution as a means of time saving.
The festival will be held in two days time so I won’t yet be able to upload the film. We did finish roughly in time but decided to spend a couple of additional days cleaning up the inside of the shapes and adding some keyframes where we had to compromise them as well due to the lack of time. We were all very happy about how the film turned out and certainly keeping in mind that we only had 48 hours, we were able to produce a 2 minute film in such a short amount of time.