I started off on my project with the intent of creating a complete short film in the span of 3 months, from October 2019 to January 2020. As my ambition for the project grew, the more time it took to actually move forward between the inspiration, storyboarding and the creation of the film. The project became too big for the time given though, so I took up a different option instead: to create trailers to show the work I had already made whilst experimenting in a few other methods of animation and illustration.
The theme that connected both my practical project and the extended research essay was that of dark fairy tales involving innocent children and monstrous adults. I wanted to bring that style of story into a modern environment, portraying the more contemporary world of today through the exaggerated viewpoint of an imaginative child.
This also ties into my interest in the uncanny as the world in the film references our modern cities and roads through the old lens of a strange, dark children’s book from the 1800s/1900s.
The target audience took a while to get a hold of, however I have settled for the young adult audience as they would more likely have a nostalgic connection to dark, horrific fairy tales as opposed to a regular child audience. The themes also tie more into a more cynical view of childhood which is fitting for an audience that’s recently come of age.
I will be the first to admit I was more focused on animating parts of what the final film would look like for the main trailer as opposed to the 2 teasers which were meant to be experiments.
A multimedia approach had to be taken with what would achieve a desired effect and what I thought could help in future projects. Taking what I learnt from a previous project, I wanted to utilise both the two-dimensional hand-drawn assets and include some three-dimensional assets to differentiate certain elements. Backgrounds and characters could be 2D but some elements including vehicles or buildings which need to be turned in a shot had to be 3D.
My first attempt at doing this went over rather well, working in Cinema 4D and using a hand-drawn texture on a 3D model of a car. This could then be filmed and then repeated to give the appearance of a traffic jam in a few shots. I did only use them for two shots in the main trailer but regardless they did a serviceable job.
I then utilised a more traditional film-making approach by employing stop motion for a scene in which the camera spins around a building. The jitteriness of the stop motion actually complemented the film’s old-style look rather nicely, and helps to go along with the Cinema 4D animation overlaying the 2D assets.
I did very much enjoy making the visual style of the film and understanding what type of world I was designing.
I do wish the same could be said of the child’s character animation. I had to switch numerous times with different animation mediums to know which one would look the best. I just couldn’t decide and I was running out of time so I decided to employ all three, although I mostly used stop frame drawing animation I did also use stop motion cut outs and ProCreate for experimentation. Overall I would say this was a nice little experimental project to help me get a grasp at what I was good at and the style of film I wanted to make.