A sunny young girl ventures out into the forest to refill her honey jar, but something isn't quite right about her and her cheerful waltz through the woods...
This film is set to the song Solar Waltz by Cosmo Sheldrake, with themes inspired by the lyrics to the song as well as a short comic by illustrator Jude Clark. The number of shots and their subjects are more or less unchanged from the original animatic, seen below.
Production for this film was completed over fourteen weeks from concept to final render as my senior project at the Digital Words Institute of the University of Florida. I used Adobe Premiere Pro for video composition, Adobe Photoshop for illustration and texturing, and Autodesk Maya for modeling, rigging, and animation.
Animatic and Story Synopsis
Beatrice (portrayed by a modified Lucy rig by anim_matt) is a calm and cheerful young girl, living with her small family on the outskirts of town in a house surrounded by woodland. She wakes up one morning and makes breakfast, only to find that her honey jar is empty. She ventures out into the forest to get more from the Hive Tree... where the bees are using criminals that venture too deeply into the wood as raw materials for their honey production.
Concept Sketches
These are some of the original concept sketches and plans for the look and feel of the animation, including things such as color palettes and basic lore. Though some details ended up being shifted around or modified, the basic premise stayed the same.
Set Design and Production
These concept sketches were later translated to the 3D set designs in Maya, the large amount of texture and lighting work that went into making the house and forest colorful yet cohesive, and the self-modeled Hive Tree.
A few highlights of the production process included adding paintings and other lore-filled Easter Eggs referencing my fellow classmate's films, little details such as a wind spinner hung from the porch, and re-rigging a bee I found online.
The bee was originally rigged in Cinema 4D, but moving it to Maya necessitated a new skeleton and controls. The bee features IK leg controls, IK bendy controls for the abdomen, and FK controls for the head, thorax, wings, antennae, and a separate hexapod control for all six legs. A movement demo can be found here.
The last detail I wanted to include was the subtle addition of flower symbolism, as seen in the original Beatrice concept design sheet above. There are orange lilies for pride and disdain of the criminals who would dare use the forest as their hiding place, poisonous buttercups for Beatrice's childishness, white daisies scattered around for innocence juxtaposed against the true darker nature of everything, lavender for distrust of the house's deceptive cheer, and bee balm flanking the exterior path for protection against evil (which can mean either the bees or the criminals they catch).
