Unit 4 is a challenging unit. We were divided into different groups to work together to create an animated short film. We need to start with the concept in the early stage. At the beginning, everyone actively develops their own ideas to create interesting stories. Then we voted within the group and finally chose “Jack in the Box”. With a clear direction, everyone started to divide the work and look for reference pictures. My first task was to draw the perspective scenes in the script.

Then I waited for the storyboard to be completed to revise it and determine the overall color tone. Also, during the short free time, I designed an opening title for our film. The background is a transparent mask that will be placed directly on the Establishing shot at the beginning of the film.

After I got the storyboads, I edited them together to make a rough animatic.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RDQ4i47SppZ1IoyarVNMK4T0Nx3nBwTg/view?usp=drive_link – Rough Animatic

The next step was modeling, I need to design and build a Christmas tree and the decorations on it. After discussion among the team members, we decided to make some more stylized appearance models. My Christmas tree model is built layer by layer. First, I built a circle of cartoon leaves according to the reference picture, and then continued to stack them upwards to form a tree. Then I made light strips, using array to make sufficient number of light balls and tie them to the spiral lines, and added some small stars and balls to make the decoration on the Christmas tree more abundant.

Finally, I refined the model details and painted it. I also made a broken decoration ball in case the plot required it.

Because our team was short of people, I made a chair and a vacuum cleaner after I finished the Christmas tree. It was not too difficult to build the model according to the reference picture.

After we complete the model, we started doing animation, which is the most difficult part of the whole project I think. Based on the total number of shots, each of our team members had to render eight shots. We have to focus on every character’s action in order to make character to move naturally, which is very painful. When I was working on the character Charlie, I found some bugs in the model. The thing that was most affected was his hair. When I rotated the model’s head left and right, the hair would spin around in different direction.

I tried many fixes but nothing worked, so I finally decided to re-rig the character. I use the rigfy add-on that comes with blender. I found a tutorial online and successfully bound it to the model and completely solved the problem.

Then I moved on to focus on the character movements, which took a long time. Each shot was made as close to the storyboard as possible, but some had to be slightly modified for better realization. After completing the character action in the scene, setting the camera position, focal length and time, waitting for rendering! Very exciting moment!

Looks good. Although there are still many shortcomings, at least it gives me a little sense of accomplishment. I have tried my best in the limited time. My last task is to edit the animation and make a short film. But my team members haven’t finished their animation and rendering parts yet, so I made mine first. Putting these 8 rendered clips into the editing software, arrange them in order and add sound effects and background music.

Then I got: https://drive.google.com/file/d/145rvGksE5L3RoYi4R6Iqe28XVvFhbqp5/view?usp=drive_link

This was a very tiring but rewarding project, Giving me chance to produce a complete animated film from pre-production to post-production. I am looking forward to other group members’ rendering pieces, and I will also try my best to help my members when they need, in order to finish our short film as soon as possible!