How to make a short film | MAKING OF MISMATCHED

so I'm making a short film and I promise you guys I'd show you my process so let's start at the very beginning first I have this idea and I have to get it out on paper and only I can really understand what's happening at this point because the drawings are super janky I don't want to give anything away but the story is really about fashion and the character's relationship with it and at this point I have a lot of gaps on my storyboards but I'm not too worried about it I'll figure it out later I'm going to build this set in 3D so I'm trying to figure out the layout and where the character walks in the storyboards once I figure out we open blender and I watch a lot of tutorials I'm not familiar with blender I learned Maya years ago but once I built the frame of the room I go to CG Trader and turbo squid and I import a bunch of room items that I need and then I try to figure out for the simpler items how to build it myself building for myself took forever I really had to figure out what this program was but I always wanted to make 3DS it was the perfect excuse so I made these books I made this lamp that's my model for scale when I was done this is what my style looked like part two in the progress on how I'm making the short film so the reason I built my set in 3D is because I didn't want to figure out the perspective in my backgrounds so I'm going to set up the cameras in my blender files so I have all my backgrounds ready to storyboard over this is really efficiently streamlining the background and starboard process because now the backgrounds are blocked in and I don't gotta do any thinking power so once I got my camera set up I'm ready to board but I also want to do the lighting so I can kind of get an idea of what this Sunset lighting would look like and once again I don't have to do any thinking power so after playing with some lighting and blender I kind of have the general idea of where my lights are going to go and how it's going to affect the scene next with storyboard and Adobe animate so I import all my backgrounds and I just start drawing right over it this took maybe a longer than a week to do because I get stuck thinking of new ideas so I have to like step away from a computer and come back the next day with brush ideas and at this point the storyboards are basically done and then I'm ready for the next step part three after storyboarding I bring it over to Premiere Pro and I import a bunch of rough sound effects from YouTube or recording myself and with rough sound you can really get an idea of the mood and like pacing of the film and also cut around and play with some timing here and then I'm finally ready to start almost designing I collect a bunch of references for like color and style my main Inspirations for backgrounds is Kevin Dart I love his textured and Mindless backgrounds they're very simple but they're so crisp and elegant I'm also screenshotting my favorite short films online golden hour has beautiful colors and I really want a monochromatic look to my film and they're both being taken place in Sunset I'm wondering if I can incorporate the inky lines and simple style of Mall 84 and also taking inspiration from the color scheme I'm not sure if the lineless style in my mind is going to work with the characters I'm looking how Sundown incorporate characters and backgrounds with line I'm super inspired by Duo's lighting and color on their backgrounds and characters also this lift commercial is sick and I love the lineless and simple style and seeing if I can incorporate something like that and now I can start design animating a film by myself part four it's finally time to start design so I'm going to start with my color script so I start by taking a screenshot of each story beat which is a screenshotper scene and I'm displaying all my color references my lighting references as inspiration as I start my color script once I have my Beats in order I block out the script I choose the four main colors that I want my film to transition through so I wanted to begin at Sunset so very warm colors and I want it to end at night time so very blue cold colors using the lasso tool I block out basic shapes to get the idea of what's happening in the scene my main focus is to get the color and the lighting and the mood across I'm focusing on contrast and how the lighting affects the shapes in the room and I'm trying to keep it as monochromatic as possible because that's the look I'm going for so once I'm done I have a clear idea of what my colors are going to look like it starts very orange and transitions to a more pink color more to purples and finally at night it's blue and now that I'm done this I can move on to my favorite part character design making an animated film all by myself part 5. really took five parts to get to my favorite part character design I start by pulling up a few storyboard beats and I start sketching out some ideas I'm playing with shapes proportions head size body size angles and stuff like that and the more I explore the more I hone in on my balance of straights and curves sketching out the storyboard beeps just to see what I can come up with and then I'm exploring hair on the base model that I'm happy with trying to keep it simple and graphic this one's too complicated these are weird shape lines it's a little complicated because it's asymmetrical and I love these pigtails but this one's a good balance of complexity and symmetry next I explore some colors using my color script as a background and this is the hair I end up choosing the reason I choose these colors is because it's a very limited palette and it's sandwiched perfectly good tip for creating Harmony is to add the same color at the top and the bottom of your character and for costume always using inspiration from the internet want to keep it trendy but simple for animation this one's a cool shape but a little too business this one's cool really complicated in the chest I like this one a lot a little bit of secondary action here simple enough with a little bit of detail this one's very simple but is it too basic and I like this one but there's a lot of horizontal repeating lines so I'm not sure adding some color with the background I do have a color change in my films so I'm doing two versions with the color changes this is the outfit with the two color variations that I decided on that's how I developed this character next we're doing turns making a short animated film all by myself part six so now that we figured out our character it's time to make a turnaround for her I already have my three-quarter front so I'm starting on the easiest posed front and it's easy because you get to just draw half and then mirror the rest when I'm doing turnarounds I make sure that everything is lined up I'm focusing on volume always referencing back to my original drawing so nothing feels out of place I'm also focusing on really graphic shapes and hard angles and because I'm animating in 2D I have a lot of opportunity to cheat with angles I also make sure my turn is very clean and not sketchy when I'm doing three quarterbacks I just use a three-quarter front and kind of flip things around until it looks okay and then I can actually go in and detail what three quarterback looks like I'm making a seven point turn because she has asymmetrical hair and I'm making this almost front for you just in case I need it putting hair on her making sure that all the volumes are the same throughout so the animation can turn and won't be jarring I make a turn with her first costume chain and I'm working on the second costume change once I'm happy with that I can color the two front poses and I'm doing two of them because there's a major lighting change in the film so by the end I have my base turn First costume turn and my final costume turn and that's about it and now I can start on my costume design that's right I got a lot more questions making a short animated film all by myself seven I got a little one for you today I'm working on costuming slash posing of these four still to my storyboards and because they don't move I'm just going to design the costume and the pose work smarter not harder a lot of costume changes in my film so this first one is like a sexy going out look next is like a punk rock look and I'm always referencing back to my original turnaround make sure all the volumes proportions and stuff is correct seeing how far I could push these Expressions next still is a sporty look and finally we have this really dramatic ball gown look making sure all the poses are different and that the Silhouettes are clear and really encompassing the vibe of the outfit doing coloring overlaid on the background transitions more pink throughout these Stills so I'm trying to capture that in the outfits as well and little quick Stills is a great way simplify the animation process and you don't have to animate every single thing you know and then I could add a little more complexity in the outfits and then I have one last step for character making an animated film all by myself part 8. so I have a lot of quick scenes with a lot of costume changes so what I'm going to do in this episode is special poses so I'm going design the character right in her pose with the color so I'm looking at my color script and I'm going to design the scene this will make production a lot faster so everything will have a reference point and color this will already be figured out so I did a quick little hanger scene and now I actually have my character poses I'm taking my color script as reference and I'm just kind of color picking and actually posing the character this next one is her reaching under the bed and kind of like a cowboy outfit so I'm getting my references out always got to get the angles right focusing on anatomy and perspective in this shot not worrying about the background just trying to get the character okay hear me out this next shot listen to me it's a little maid outfit but hear me out it's ironic it's part of the it's part of the bit okay so she's reaching into a little maid outfit and it's and it's funny color picking some background colors to kind of fit it in with the characters colors here's to straightening her hair in a very emo scene look I'm always referencing my original character design right off to the side and sometimes I overlay a and not anatomical pieces just to make sure I have everything in the right proportions and I'm adding more pink Hues as The Story Goes On from changing from yellow to more purple and this last one we have kind of like a rave outfit those are my references that I have on the side and at this point I'm really leaning into the purple pink look of the film and it's not clean it's not tight it's it's a pretty loose sketch at this point and those are all my special poses and now I'm basically done pre-production and one more step an animated film all by myself part nine next step is to find a musician and luckily I know an incredibly talented musician that made the score for my last film bang bang and it goes something like this [Music] his name is Louis bellichi AKA yui June and we met during my internship in Denmark [Music] so I messaged him and who's really excited to help out with this film and then I sent him some references I really wanted to feel 80s inspired and he's been working on a lot of cool beats for this score I'm very picky but luckily Louie's amazing at taking notes what a good sport and actually he sent me the final mastered score today so yay an animated film by myself part 10 but we finished pre-production and now we're ready to start production which means starting on our backgrounds so starting with our establishing shot I'm templating my file and bringing in my 3D Composites so I can draw right on top of it and I have a few options some with lighting and some just by itself I'm bringing you my color script oh my God this is going by so fast and then I'm starting to block in my pieces I'm really glad I built this set in 3D because now I just have to trace to to get the perspective in and just worry about texture and color and lighting and stuff like that so I'm really working one asset at a time looking at my color script for reference always looking at images for references if I'm stuck somewhere here I'm adding a reflection in the ground in perspective because I want it to look like a clean floor and I'm turning on my 3D comp to follow the lighting so I have the lighting in perspective and everything and I'm inverting it and I'm adding more lighting shading the furniture pieces and also adding overlays finishing touches to make it look really really good adding some some white highlights and I'm drawing in my character so I have reference when I start animating and figuring out the lighting what a scene would kind of look like when it's done and that's about it for this one a couple more background videos so let me know what questions you have about them making a short animated film all by myself part 11. well this is basically part two of backgrounds so I'm going to show you how I stretch one background into two scenes it's always good to get as much reuse as possible in your film so you're not working as hard so this is my first scene and then here's my second scene and they're very similar but the color schemes are very different so one's really orange and one's really blue so I start by planning my frames over my 3D model and my smaller frame is always 1920x1080 and the bigger one is is bigger here's all my Composites for my 3D with my model standing for for size and scale starting with my establishing shot because it's a wider frame and I'm just drawing over my my 3D model like this I use my lasso tool to block it in I use texture on top and I also have text sure on the edges so it's not just a crisp Edge adding some details to make it look really nice and then adding my shadows I'm adding really dramatic lighting because it's really important to the story although we have our first shot done we're going to do this one next so it's blue it's a little bit smaller it's a little more tight and frame so I'm taking my existing orange drawing and I'm just playing around with the colors trying to move around the saturation and the Hue and then for the story adding a bunch of clothes piled onto the bed and the floor so once the base is there I'm going to start adding my light and Shadow until eventually it looks something it looks something like this and then playing around with the 3D model on top it's always fun to see where it came from and where it went and then those two backgrounds are done and I can check it off in my list next video will be the last one for backgrounds I'll show you pop pop all of them really quick and we're at part 12. Back to Basics my background resolution has to be 1920 by 1080 for white screen and this black border is just some space for bleed because I'm gonna have kind of like a handheld camera next I import all my 3D Stills so I can trace over the background and I have another seam that's actually a zoom in of this scene so what I'm going to do do is I'm gonna make this smaller box 1920x1080 and then the bigger frame around it is actually just much bigger so now I can make this large establishing shot and then the smaller shot doesn't lose any resolution and you know I have to work less hard here's another example of a reuse I have the same background I'm just coloring it different and adding different stuff to it and I always export my 3D background in a lot of different elements so you see everything individually and some scenes have movable assets so the store has to open and I change the background I made it look a lot better so that that's that's a lot better and look them the magic of overlays and after I finish 21 backgrounds then I can move on to rough animation so I finished all my backgrounds and now I'm ready to start rough animating so I bring in my storyboards and then I start keyframing the the really basic movements and then I add some in-betweens and really focus on arcs and timing and then and then eventually I get a finished scene and here I'm using reference I always I always use reference when I'm in trouble when I'm stuck and I've animated a couple of short films in the past but I'm not very good at animating so rough animation it's like and it also it just takes the longest ever it's a very long process so here I have kind of a rough version then here is my final roughed um scene here humans don't move in straight lines when we do actions when we move our arms so it's it's really important to remember to focus on arcs and s-curves when you're doing animation and here you could see that I'm using s-curves to make the flow the secondary action of her hair and all these different colors help me kind of layer things so first I do the body and then I do the forearm and then I do the back arm so it just keeps it simpler and even though walk Cycles have been ingrained in my brain for years from animation school I still take reference subtle acting is a lot more difficult to capture an animation than big big huge actions so it was tough and look in one minute you see all the animation being done even though for me it took like six months or something now that rough animation is done it's time to clean it up with clean animation this is the most tedious part of the process because you know your rough animation your lines don't have to be perfect and you get the gist of it but when you clean it up you really have to be precise because even the most subtle lines are going to look jittery and not right if you don't do it right and because my patience is kind of shot at this point after doing all that rough animation sometimes I rush through the cleanup process which makes the the cleanup look worse than the rough but it's at this phase that I really need to make sure my volumes are all equal you know the hand sizes are always the same they don't Jitter I Speed Line the process by using a lot of copy and pastes and moving assets around instead of redrawing every element it makes the lines look smoother at the end but it also has a more graphic look so fire battles and then I had to animate a couple scenes in Photoshop because the the brush stroke had to match with the background which was annoying because I hate using Photoshop to animate it's very tough when you're not familiar with it and now that I'm done cleanup I could move on to coloring which is the easiest part time to watch a movie while I do do it time to color all the scenes in my short film although I may call myself the efficiency Queen when it comes to drawing it is absolutely not the case for animating none of my lines are closed none of my overlaps make sense so when it comes to clean up I have to basically reanimate everything because nothing is correct and also at this stage I add highlights when the scene calls for it but it's all not that bad like this scene is a perfect example of when things go right and it's just super easy to to get everything done from start to finish your your buttons really just make sense here but most of the time it's quite a headache in this scene for example it may look straightforward but at this point I realized that I did not overlay things properly so I basically had to buy hand buy eye recolor everything above the lines under the lines wherever the lines it's complicated I suggest really paying attention to how you're overlapping things in your cleanup phase so then your color phase is easy peasy and there you have it all color is finished and now I can start compositing I have looked forward to compositing this film since day one this is the stage that it's finally starting to come together and all those ideas in my head that I I wish that it's going to look like it finally looks like although whenever I start compositing there's always issues that I run into and I'm just having YouTube open and Google open and Adobe support opened the entire time while I'm doing this a lot of it isn't glamorous it's tedious it's exporting pngs and overlaying them making sure that things are lined up but once the scene is actually set up and I set up all my scenes at the same time so then I could just do the fun part afterwards which is adding coloring and lighting and little um little boil effects on little things like that I am unfortunately a perfectionist so whenever I export a scene and I'm like this is done I'm ready to go I go back and I change just a little tweak and I have to export it all over again and I do that like a dozen times I'm finally adding all these cool little transitions to make scenes really work together and that's it next I have to find an sfx artist okay before sound design I'm gonna do my credits first so my credit song is 15 seconds so I'm gonna have three panels showing my sound designer and my musicians on their respective panels honestly I've been looking forward to making these credits since day one it's always my favorite part because it's the most fun you know you get to be influenced by the style of the film but make you something completely new so that's why I like it so in Photoshop I'm making this really big map and then I'm just gonna move my camera from um from frame to frame in After Effects I thought little text bubbles would go really well with the theme of the movie but it just didn't work in the end so I changed that font I thought the after effects part would be really quick and straightforward but nothing ever is if I learned anything because I wanted everything to be layered and have Dimension so I could have a shaky cam where everything's moving in depth um everything was really complicated and I did the most come complicated thing for the least amount of payout so I hope it's worth it so now my credits look from this to this and it looks a lot better and that's it for my credits now I'm gonna get a sound designer I need sound designer my finished film sounds like this still this scratch track simply won't do so I get on my Instagram and I do an open call for a sound designer and I get an email back from an awesome sound designer with an awesome demo reel [Music] I sent him my film he likes it we're on board I put together kind of an outline of all the sound effects I want he gets to work he sends it back to me I'm listening to it I send some notes and then it's done thank you so much if you've been watching my process from the very beginning and I also made an art of mismatched book and this is my pride and joy it has a lot of process behind the filmmaking and a lot of really cool artwork and visual development that went into making the film so it's part educational and part a cool art book the film thanks so much bye

Channel: Jackie Droujko

Views: 382,083

Keywords: animation, animation process

Id: 2BERE-IytcU

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 19 2022