The film has come a long way since this first iteration. I wasn't entirely sure about the details of the story that I wanted to tell at first. The original idea was to have the final destination to not be revealed to the audience, but it ended up being anti-climactic. The beginning sequence was shortened a considerable amount, and some shots in the middle with Kat were scrapped. I'm happy with how the film came out in the end.
I knew I had to make the main character, Cedar, simple enough to draw multiple times over, but I also wanted to make him unique. In hindsight, I should not have included so many lines on his hat or clothes, because it proved to be a challenge to keep consistent.
I like to brainstorm on paper, so in my journal I tried to sketch out my vision for Cedar and how his van, the flyer, and his camera would look. I had previously made a Pinterest board for a character that was similar to him so I used that for inspiration. I wanted him to have some sort of hat but I had some trouble deciding what. I went through many trials trying to make his hat work with his ears and his personality. I started to draw him digitally based on the sketches but I didn't like how the original version came out.
I used Photoshop to plan out my backgrounds and their black and white values before I redrew them in the animation program. I took inspiration from nature photography and pictures of New Jersey streets. For some shots, I was able to use the perspective of my reference footage to help me plan.
I started the color script with a very rough idea of what I want the film to look like. I took screenshots of the major moments in the animatic and came up with solid colors for each based on my lighting notes in my shot list. The lighting was based on the mood of the shot. For example, I wanted the beginning to be sad and grey, and I wanted it to be more colorful towards the end. Then, I refined the color script and included values and gradients. I didn't follow this completely, but it was helpful in giving me an idea of what colors to use where.
I worked primarily in Toonboom Harmony and Adobe Premiere Pro, with some help from Photoshop for planning. Here's what my workspaces looked like. My organization could be better, but I had no problems navigating through my work. This project has definitely helped me become more familiar with Harmony and my pipeline was refined a lot during this process. My only regret is that I went with frame by frame animation instead of puppet, because I did end up making partial rigs for all of my scenes and it would've cost a lot less time to make one main rig and a few other rigs for scenes where Cedar is specifically posed a certain way.
Production
Adrian Lane
Music & SFX
Damian Calle
Font
Hansip - Khurasan
Special Thanks to
Liss
Professor Karlson
2D Square
