This film is the end result of a fear-fueled and sleepless night. I hope you like it. Theme
About the Team Our team, Exit 84, is an alumni team comprised of four CCAD Animation 2015 graduates: myself (Jinny Hinkle), Michelle Rakar, Hillary Hastings, and Laura Mansfield. All of us are best friends and had many experiences at CCAD collaborating on big film projects, like Nautia. We were still new to the 24-hour time constraint, however. I myself spent just over 300 hours creating my graduation film Puddle, and that was done across two semesters... Not one night with nothing to keep you awake but three donuts from Giant Eagle (they were good donuts). Behind the Scenes For starters, as soon as the theme announcement was over, we jumped into a Google Doc to start brainstorming ideas. We threw out an idea about a person falling asleep while watching Netflix and dreaming that their food had come to life with rubber-hose arms and googly eyes. We almost went with it, too, but then I brought up something about a drive-in graveyard. Now that idea really got us excited about the 23.5 hours left ahead of us, so we took it and flew. As soon as we had the idea, we all started throwing out the plot and stitching it together, and then we all sat in silence with our eyes shut and timed it out in our heads using the stopwatch on Google. We got it all down really quick, and then our resident storyboard artist Hillary immediately went to making thumbnails.
At this point we were 6 hours into it (*shudder*) and ready to start backgrounds. I asked to take all the exterior shots, because I'm the big drive-in fan of the group and the only one who likes drawing cars. It was around midnight to one a.m., and I promised Hillary I'd have something ready for her to animate by the time she was back on at six a.m. So, the race was on. I spent probably half the time on that first wide shot of the drive-in screen, fiddling with that stupid car. I still hate it. Oh well. The rest were much easier to rush out thanks to PS brushes. After I was done, it was nearly six a.m., and we still didn't have a clue how we were going to animate. So, I started to panic.
The above image (left) shows my first test of the rig. I was trying to see how much we could get away with by animating directly on top of the backgrounds in Photoshop. The easiest way to do it was with key-to-key poses and not much in-between. It ended up saving a lot of headache this way, and we didn't have to worry about looking inconsistent between shots. Once Hillary was back in, she started on the interior backgrounds (above, bottom). All the while, Michelle was working diligently on compositing and putting in sound fx and music. She kept adding everything in as soon as it was done, like magic! Animating ended up going much smoother and faster than any of us anticipated (thank you, rig). So, by around noon (t-minus 7 hours) all that was really left was the ambiguous "flashback" sequence that we all decided was going to be really touching and cool, but didn't actually design. I basically got free rein with the thing and it ended up becoming one of my favorite scenes to work on: We were wrapping up by 2PM. I stood over Michelle's shoulder while she replayed those same 30 seconds over and over. We made notes on timing and she'd go in and adjust it frame by frame. Once we were satisfied and felt like everything read well, we finished and submitted around 4PM, with three whole hours to spare! Then, we ordered Noodles & Company and fell asleep while watching The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It was a good feeling. Final Thoughts Overall, all of us were really happy with the outcome. It also made us step back and look at the work we'd done in the past--starting with our first collaborative project, a little short film called The Ugly Dinosaur (which lived up to its name). As first semester sophomores we'd had a team of about ten people who worked hard to get it done in under five weeks. We've come a long way since then, but the lessons remain the same.
This project has inspired all of us. Personally, I'd like to get back into making my own short films. Just not in 24 hours. Thanks for reading!
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by Jinny Hinkle
I started out reading Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog comics in elementary school, dreaming of making my own stories. Archives |