IT TAKES A VILLAGE
Elves and humans live at odds, with Elves often being the oppressor. When a young, starving boy decides to steal from an Elven stand, he gets caught by an Elf who decides to take his punishment too far. Tired of the mistreatment, the downtrodden humans of this village decide to step in, intimidating and distracting the elf for long enough for the boy to escape. The elf comes to a realization: there is power in numbers, and her position of authority isn't as secure as she once thought.
This film was the culmination of a semester's worth of hard work. I worked on every piece of the production pipeline: concept creation, animatic, environment design, animation blocking and polish, lighting, and rendering.
PROJECT PROPOSAL
We began our projects with concept work and mood boards, collecting inspiration from published works and defining a plot line to follow. Below I show the project I chose to pursue, but I pitched two other ideas as well.
As you can see, the project I proposed changed a LOT from the start date to the final production. the only thing that really remained the same was the visual mood I wanted to achieve.
ANIMATIC(S)
I then focused on shifting my verbal proposal into a visual one in the form of an animatic. Even between the proposal and first animatic, a ton of changes were made to create a more compelling storyline.
This animatic was tweaked and changed many, many times over the next semester. Shots were added, removed, or changed to impact the story and shot composition. Timing was adjusted to vary contrast and give different shots more or less importance.
DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING
As the animatic continued to change, I pushed into the development and testing phase. I sought out rigs to fit the setting of my scene, and performed pose testing to make sure they were quality rigs to use. I collected props and 3D models to begin building out the environment, including models I'd previously made myself. After assembling the rough environment, I did some primitive lighting and render tests as well.
BLOCKING
As the longest student filmed yet produced by my program (a whopping 51 shots), I had a LOT of blocking to do. Many of the shots included multiple characters and intense actions and expressions as well.
All of these shots, prior to being blocked, also had reference footage by and of myself filmed and compiled.
POLISHING
After the blocking phase, I had to do a second pass to polish and re-time the shots. As it was getting late in the semester at this point, I focused most of my time and energy on the shots I thought would be most impactful.
During this stage, a lot of my shots ended up much longer than initially planned.
RENDERING
Rendering and polishing began to overlap. Once a shot was polished, I would set up the lighting, and then I would leave it to render on a secondary computer while I continued to polish other shots.
Rendering requires a lot of light tweaking to minimize grain and ensure the lights are the correct color palette and placement. Oftentimes, renders can also crash over night, so they have to be monitored and checked in on.
FINAL VIDEO
Once all shots were rendered, I worked to finalize and synch the sound. I also implemented color correction using Lumetri curves within Premiere Pro, and created title and credit cards in AfterEffects.