Pre Production
As any film would it started with an idea. Concepts, a rough script and a pitch. The idea for Clank and Noland began one day in a lesson I was teaching. One of my music students loves to create robots so we started the class by drawing two robots. Clank is a lovable witty character inspired by Fender from Robots and Noland a silent yet lovable charming character who provides the comedic sidekick in the short film. Noland is inspired by the great Baymax from Disney's Big Hero 6. All inspiration and character development can be found in my pitch video below.
The Two sketches above and left are the initial sketches. Clank originally had a buck tooth that was cut after the realization it would break the mesh and look strange when animating. I originally drew Clank as a superhero robot as that was the brief my student gave me but the cape was cut as I was not confident or experienced with realistic cloth animation.
Noland's design has stayed more or less the same other than the removal of his weapons and his name changed to Noland from sphere. This was inspired by Chuck Noland from Tom Hanks' Cast Away film. |
Storyboard- Full run through in pitch found below
Pitch
Production
In terms of production I tend to be a person who gets carried away with modelling and I completely forget to take any screen shots of my progress. Unfortunately at the time of doing this section of my website I had to move to a different device to my usual PC as it broke and was unusable. I did not realise my progress screen grabs were saved on the internal storage, therefore making them inaccessible. All final productions can be found above or in the scene analysis section.
Post Production
Editorial
I really enjoy editing and have thoroughly enjoyed doing it when creating videos for my YouTube channel. Once created, I rendered my scenes as stated above and imported them into Premiere Pro as an image sequence, this makes the series of images come together frame by frame to create an animation. This is the same way Stop Motion and Flip book animations are created. I imported all media into a full timeline and imported the voice over. The voice over was sent over by voice actor Max and was converted into a WAV file. This was then added to the timeline a cut accordingly. After exporting and uploading my first draft, my tutor and I looked at improvements. We decided that sound effects were needed as well as something to fill the fading to black. This ended up being a Photoshopped Noland still, now covered in soot from a faulty TNT block. After this creation I edited in the new frames, extended the beginning to remove the first fade and added in sound effects. These were taken from a free licensed effects website my tutor gave me and slotted in accordingly. These sounds I think really bring the project to another level.