IDS - Animated Short Film - Production Diary - 001
Project overview
This is the beginning of my production diary for my short animated film “ I Dont Steal “ ( Currently the working title. )
This is an original story about a father and his son taking a normal trip to the gas station that inadvertently leaves a mark on the son’s memory for the rest of his life.
As I have built my career as a Visual Effects Artist, I have always played around with character animation in commercial projects, but never anything in the scope of a film and for sure not all on my own.
Inspiration
Click Image to Watch
I recently took on the challenge of creating an animated film in 72 hours for a local Film competition and for that I used Adobe Firefly to generate the artwork that I would then animate.
Check out the post here where you can watch it and see some more details about it.
It was a lot of fun and a lot of work and ultimately I loved how it came out. In my eyes it was a very successful turnaround for the time frame, but I did have mixed feelings once I was done, with the idea of all of the art being AI Generated.
It was generated through “legal” terms from using Adobe’s own service that says they only train on their own licensed content, but in the end, you never truly know what art it could have trained on. And to a viewer it just looks AI plane and simple, regardless of how it was created.
But it gave me the bug to make another animated film, but this time I wanted to have art drawn by actual artists, not generated, and also not made by me.
I’ve always liked the juxtaposition of animated characters combined with real world footage and being a VFX Artist this kind of style felt right up my alley.
I could go and shoot all the plates I would need for my backgrounds and then composite in my characters.
This idea works well for me because I won't have to find someone to draw a large amount of backgrounds and they can stay focused on just illustrating characters.
Concept Mockups
I used Adobe Firefly to create some placeholder illustrations and then composited them into some shots off google to help create my pitch deck and mood board to help explain my idea to anyone helping on the project.
Concept Mockup Compositing with AI
I pulled generic images from online for shots I thought would work well and be close to what will be shot for the final film. I used Adobe Photoshop with Generative Fill to extend all the stills to create more image to work with as well as get the image to look closer to what I want to shoot, which will be with a wide angel lens.
Inspiration from real projects
Here is an inspiration board I made to show examples of a similar concept. I love the looks of 2D animation on a live action plate, especially when it has been composited in with added contact shadows and light fall off from the real plate.
Current Progress
Currently I have the artwork being drawn up and I have started a storyboard animatic to help me determine the pacing so far.
I’ve also gotten an actor in the audio booth to record the voice over for the film, so I should have the final VO ready to work with, though I might have some revisions that could change one of the characters voices.
Next steps
Next steps that I’ll need to work on are finishing up the animatic, so that I’ll know exactly what shots to get when I go onset for shooting plates.
Determine my method and workflow for animating the characters and compositing them into a shot.
Want to help out?
This is a passion project that I am ultimately doing both in my own time and my own money as well as calling in favors when I can. If you’d like to help me out in any way I’ve added a donation option below if you feel the want/need to help contribute to this project. Anyone who donates will have a credit added in the film.
If you can’t donate please consider signing up to the email list to get updates on the project as it progresses along.
