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THE BRIEF

Design and create a main title sequence, up to 30 seconds long, for the short film 'Operation Cleanse' currently being created by KPB122 students for their narrative film assessment. A comedy about a young man enlisting the help of his friends for an emergency last minute house clean before his mother visits.

RESEARCH

Script Notes

  • Lot's of breaking the 4th wall and addressing the audience for narrative and jokes
  • Recurring references to pop culture and heroic poses and themes
  • Relationship dynamics & Personality differences
  • Running out of time. Gamifying?
  • Desperation and last minute efforts

Moodboard

CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

I want to create a fun and energetic title sequence that reflects the playful nature of the script and plays off of the dorky references that are quite heavily scattered throughout the story. I want to create a feeling of excitement and heroic suspense to flow into the sense of adrenaline that the characters will be experiencing in the film as they rush around trying to get everything finished in time for the visit. I will be basing my design on the concept of a comic book adventure, and utilising the fun costumes and soundtrack from the movie Kick-Ass as kind of a baseline for the emotions that I want to conjure up.

Brainstorming the Shots

Art Style References

VISUALS - Comic book / graphic design inspired. Fantasy mixed with every day normal life.

Thumbnail Storyboard

Enter into the house and move through various scenes of mess, a washing-up bubble avalanche with the apparently soap-loving Adam, followed by battle with a giant mess monster. Each of these scenes will be fairly simple in their movement to reflect the comicbook influence. Composition and colour will be especially important to achieve a good final outcome.

moving into Production

Animatic

At this stage, I was not yet sure what kind of movement I wanted to have going on, but knew that it would likely be minimal and that I wanted to keep each scene approximately the same length in order to allow time for easy reading of the credits, without lingering on any particular scene for too long. Two areas I knew I wanted movement were the washing up scene with bubbles building up, and the fight scene at the end with Tom flying towards the mess monster to attack. I initially also wanted to put in a couple of simple transitions (entering in through the front door, and the mess monster sliming the screen for the Title reveal), but later on after further development of the style and animation, I will decide to get rid of these, as they begin to feel out of place.

Collecting Resources

To go with my comic book vibe, I chose a lightly wrinkled paper texture, and this great font that I downloaded ages ago that I thought would be the perfect fit. I chose an upbeat and energetic rock song to go with the animation that I felt gave a similar feeling to what my work soundtrack was producing (albeit at a lesser level; such is the life of using royalty free music). I may embark on another music search later in an attempt to find something else that fits, but for now this will be fine to work with since I'm not relying on audio to time my scenes.

Paper Texture from Unsplash; Font from Font Squirrel; Music from Bensound

Adding Colour & Movement

I created my style frames from the compositions that I had already drawn in my storyboards, and simply adjusted the placement of items where needed after getting the elements together and seeing how much room was actually available. The colour and art style choices were made and solidified during this stage, where I chose to utilise pre-existing photos of many of the objects and vectorise them into a cartoony style, keeping things nice and tidy in appearance, and also cutting down the workload since I was going to be creating quite a lot of shots for the sequence. I added a halftone pattern over the top, to give it more of a comic book effect. I was not entirely happy with the design of Adam in my second style frame, and later adjusted the way in which I created the people. For this stage however, it served as enough of a representation for what I wanted to achieve later on.

Animation Tests

While playing around with my composition elements in After Effects and looking at different movement options, I decided on a cut-out stop motion effect. I thought this fit well with my original concept, and would work nicely for the brief as it gave an extra layer of play and lightheartedness. This also meant that most things would be using the same base for their movement, so once I had the shadow and bevel effects, as well as the expressions for movement and time posterization figured out, it was not too time consuming to copy these onto any new objects, and simply make adjustments for anything that it wasn't working for.

To get the halftone effect I wanted from my style frames, I found a tutorial online and made some adjustments in order to get the look that I wanted. The overall look and style of the animation is now solid, with adjustment layers for slight colour grading and a stylised vignette. Now it's just down to figuring out how to do the final scenes.

Tweaks & Challenges

With my original idea being quite strongly tied into the pop culture and fantasy references in the script, I found myself slowly drifting a little too far into that world when it came to working on the monster battle scenes. Since I had drawn up this part of the storyboard before I had figured out the overall design and look of the motion design piece, I found myself running into a bit of a disconnect when I got up to those shots. The scenes I had already created had brought things back into the real world more, with much more subtle references like the doodle on the notepad, and the first plunger pose which could easily be brushed off as not battle or fantasy related at all (even though I quite literally drew that on top of a photo of a bloodied warrior holding a sword). As such, I had to make a few adjustments to bring things back closer to the script so as not to confuse the audience and accidentally get them prepared for a totally different movie.

Designing the Monster

I decided to keep the monster for a few reasons. One being that I didn't really have time to come up with something new to replace it, but mainly I really liked the idea of having the monster as a representation of this huge task that the characters were facing, and the challenges and stress around that. I wanted to keep that feeling of getting pumped up on adrenaline and being able to harness that in order to accomplish something that wouldn't happen under normal circumstances, like defeating a super strong monster that's 3 times your size (or managing to tidy your entire house in under an hour). In order to execute this idea in a way that stuck to the brief and didn't alienate the audience, I went back to my monster research and started looking at ways to make it more of a 'natural' mess monster. Less something from another world, more letting things get so out of hand that they somehow become senient.

Coming at this research from this new angle gave me new ideas to work with and resulted in a design that I am really proud of. I focused on making the monster look more like an actual pile of mess and rubbish that might have been found in my own bedroom when I was a teenager, and utilised elements from the other scenes to help pull things together and keep him in the same world. This worked out so much better than I thought it would, and I'm super glad because I got to keep that element of nerdery, without going off the rails and creating confusion.

My Visual Scene Checklist

While working on the shots for my animation, I printed out a copy of my storyboard to use as a physical checklist and easy visual reference. I coloured in each panel once the composition layout and colour choices were complete, and ticked them off once I had finished animating them. Having this in front of me as I worked made it super easy to refer back to what all of my scenes looked like without having to exit the one I was working on, and made it easy to stay on track and in the right aesthetic, while also acting as a great visual tool to see how far through the project I was and how much work I still needed to block out time for.

Animation Stills

Screenshots from each of the finished scenes, compiled as they appeared in the storyboards. This shows how the finished sequence flows and makes it easier to see the details of each composition without the time constraints and movement of the animated video.

The Final Countdown. I Mean Outcome.

FIN.

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