Pre-Production
For as long as I can remember, I have always been obsessed with movies. So when I began my senior year in college, I knew the only right way to finish out my time in university was to direct a short film.
We began with thinking of a story we wanted to tell. Brainstorming themes, writing out ideas, and drawing storyboards on Post-It notes became our life. It took a lot of introspection about what stories we resonate with, about our struggles, and about what we wanted to say with our short film.
A couple of the original sketches I did for the storyboarding of the short.
Animatic layout / reference created by Jacob Slovak. Finished animatic above animated by Keala Chestnut.
Stylization
The animation industry has been exploding with interesting new visual styles in the last few years, a trend we have seen in The Wild Robot, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and the Oscar-Winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. This massive shift towards bringing back stylized animation and finding inventive ways to use CG tools inspired us, so we took a shot at it!
Defining a unique visual style within our parameters proved to be tough. For one, many stylized shaders and effects we see in Hollywood animated movies are made in proprietary engines and with custom tools and softwares, so we were already limited by the software available to us. Additionally, since my co-director and I were not fluent in every discipline, we would need to bring on volunteers to help create and execute the visual style over the span of two semesters. This was our first huge challenge as directors; finding things to cut from our script, prioritizing quality and creative intent over quantity of assets, and managing the production challenges were all things we had never had to worry about before we became directors. The result was what you see below: a simple style with broad brush strokes, imperfect linework, and strong contrast to create something that was able to be replicated by any artist we brought onto the team. The final effect was surprisingly straightforward to create. By first creating our 3D assets and set dressing, we could generate normal maps, and then use Photoshop to break up the smooth gradients into flat brush strokes before remapping the textures to the models.
Set assembly with first full style test, utilizing the surfacing method detailed in the style document. Set Assembly and Modeling/Texturing supervision done by Michael Benard.
Final composited shot showing finished style on character and set elements by Jacob Slovak.
Look Development
Defining the visual language and planning how to tell the story was the biggest challenge I faced as a co-director on this film. On previous animated short films I had worked on, this part had largely been handled by other students who specialized in storyboarding, design, and 2D art. However, armed with my knowledge about photography and cinematography, I was determined to draw the storyboards myself, as well as develop the look for the short with my own digital paintings. This way, we did not have to add the extra labor of sending notes back and forth to concept artists for every single shot I boarded. In retrospect, I feel like this was one of my favorite parts of the entire process: when the ideas could just be expressed without worry of the technical challenges to come. The color keys ended up serving as a great guide when lighting scenes later on.
Considering I had never really tried my hand at painting in Photoshop, these color keys not only helped me visualize and define the lighting style for the short, but also to find my own style of relaying ideas. As one of the directors for the film, understanding what I wanted and how to help others understand my ideas proved to be a fantastic exercise in creative communication, so now I do it for every project!
All color keys by Jacob Slovak.
Lighting and Compositing
Lighting and Compositing, my area of expertise, was probably the most demanding part of this entire process. Since we had spent so much time working on pre-production and defining our style, shots trickled their way to the lighting department pretty slowly as we waiting on finalized surfacing for our characters.
While we waited, I first created a compositing template for all Comp Artists to use to maintain consistency in color and workflow, since we would all be working separately. As a nice side effect, it acted as a sort of "plug-and-play" system, allowing us to add our renders to the comp and get a nice output by default. This way, we could get ideas of how the final effects would integrate into the shots and give notes before the real compositing process truly began.
Pictured above is a series of shots I worked on as a Lighting and Compositing Co-Lead. Across the whole short film, I worked ten shots in addition to Co-Directing.
