"The Ball" is a 3D animated short film about a young girl named Judy who would do anything she could to get into a fancy ball, even with a persistent butler trying to stop her from getting in.
I created this for my senior project and development took about 15 weeks.
After presenting pitches and settling on one idea, I created a 2D animatic and refined my story though multiple versions over the course of a few weeks with feedback from my teacher and peers. I was inspired by fairy tales and "goofy characters on a mission" type animations when creating my story.
This is the final version of my animatic:
Although my story is, for the first half, very goofy and silly, I wanted to add some sort of serious message, which is defined more in the second half. The butler and other guests reject and laugh at Judy for how she dresses. The butler's kindness in the end shows that empathy for misunderstood people can come a long way.
Due to time constraints, I decided not to model everything from scratch. I instead mashed together and edited many different types of free assets.
For example, this early version of the house was created with more than six different assets. The original house model did not have a balcony, and the doors and front porch were replaced.
Creating the interior was fun but also very important, even though a majority of the shots did not show much of it. It was vital to show what Judy's goal was: to attend a fancy ball. And by making the interior look extravagant, it emphasizes why she was rejected and laughed at due to her dirty clothes since they didn't think she fit in.
I got my rigs from ProRigs but I decided to edit the clothing textures to help the characters fit my story.
I added a monocle and bowtie to the butler and changed his shirt to have a seam and a button using Photoshop. I then edited Judy's shirt, pants, and shoe texture to look dirty, adding rips to her shirt and dirty splotches on her shoes.
You many notice Judy looks like she has a 4 o'clock shadow. This was the default skin from ProRigs and the only fix that worked was to replace her skin material to Blinn with all specular attributes set to 0.
The bush was my favorite thing to animate! To rig it I added a squash and stretch deformer to the bush geometry and constrained the mesh to Judy's root controller. I then hid everything except her legs and voila, a wonderful bush rig was created!
Although I spent about half my time actually animating during the 14 weeks, with the amount of shots I had, the amount of time for each shot was less than I normally was used to. I learned to be very efficient with my animation and got a lot faster. I was very careful and picky when recording my reference footage, and it helped me a lot with animating my characters with emotion and facial expressions.
To save on time, I composited many of my rendered shots. By separating the scene into different layers and then later combining them in After Effects, it'd take less render time overall.
For example, I'd only have to render the still background once but for animated parts I'd have to render each frame since there was a change every frame. By not needing to render the background every frame, I'm saving my computer from having to calculate the lighting for the back every time and to focus on just the character animation.
Working on this short film was a wild ride. During production I learned just how important time management was. As much as I’d like more time to polish my animation or have fancier renders, I learned to focus on what was more important: to get things done. I had to move on with my shots to finish my film on time. Through this process, I’ve become a faster animator, a faster decision maker, and became more organized with my files and scenes. And although some times were tough, with burnout and personal issues arising during production, I ultimately love what I’m doing as an animator.
Not only have I grown as an animator, I’ve also grown as a modeler, rigger, renderer, and storyteller. I am so grateful for my class, friends, and family who supported me during this time. And although it was a lot of hard work, it was a fun journey and I am looking forward to working on more animated stories in the future.
Thank you so much for watching my film!
