Animate Contest 2019: Family
24-hour long project completed under supervision of Professor Joshua Mosley — Fall 2019
Dragonframe, Adobe After Effects, ToonBoom Harmony, Watercolors
Overview
I decided to take a hand-drawn animation course. I’ve always loved drawing and watching cartoons, so I thought animation would be a fun class to take. I soon learned that animating takes a lot of time, especially frame by frame animation. Hours and hours of work go into a product which may only be seconds long. It is also very rewarding work!
When my professor mentioned a 24-hour animation contest, I was intrigued. The challenge was to animate a 30 second short over the course of 24 hours. At 24 frames per second, 30 seconds is a lot of frames! Naturally, I jumped at the chance, and ended up on a team of four other girls with a similar passion for art.
Here’s the YouTube page for the 24 hours animation contest.
The theme for 2019's 24 hour animation contest was family: what does “family” mean to you? We immediately got down to brainstorming.
Process: The Beginning
Brainstorming and storyboarding ideas
What does family mean to you? Comfort. Stability. Love. Forever. Warm colors, blobs of emotion, happiness. Family is cyclic. Once you have your family, your children have their family, and so on. Your family protects you through your life, essentially weathering the difficulties with you and for you.
From brainstorming, we came upon a story idea. We wanted it to be abstract and aesthetically pleasing, something that makes you wonder what you just watched yet gives you a feeling of peace in 30 seconds. We designed these solid colored blob-like creatures to represent the family, and created a narrative in which these blobs of love and light travel with the main character throughout all their difficulties. Through harrowing waters and a menacing pile of snakes, we manifested the emotional journey that every child goes through in the form of physical obstacles.
We split up the storyboarding based on which obstacle the character faces. Here is a look into the storyboards that I did:
storyboarding sketches
From there, we decided what medium we were to use. One of my group members was very enthusiastic about using watercolors and hand painting each frame on physical paper rather than a digital medium. To streamline the process and make it even quicker, we decided to split up the work from there. One of our team mates was very well versed with inking and drawing with pen, so she took over doing the backgrounds. I transferred some of the storyboards to a digital platform, ToonBoom Harmony, so that my teammate could use the frames to trace over and eventually paint over. Here are the storyboards that I did digitally:
After that, our watercolor artist was able to paint some of the frames like so:
examples of watercolor frames
Process: Halfway Through
It was nearing around 7 A.M. of October 5th by the time we had gotten most of the watercolor pages and storyboards done. We had started at 7 P.M. on October 4th. Now, what we had left to do was take pictures of the watercolor pages as our watercolor artist continued finishing up more frames, and then finally composite the background illustrations with the foreground illustrations and then edit the entire video together in Adobe After Effects.
We definitely had our work cut out for us.
One of my team members and I were on picture-taking duty. We had a set up in which a camera was structured pointing straight at a table where we could frame our paintings and push a button on the computer to take a picture. We worked with the Dragonframe software for this. Some difficulties we ran into was taking the picture at the right moment and not switching out the frames too quickly, or else we would end up with some shots with our thumbs hovering over the paintings. We were able to make each drawing centered through drawing guidelines and leaving a ruler on the table where we placed each frame.
Taking pictures of each frame
We were reaching the end of our 24 hours, and the pure excitement of almost being done kept us awake. We were now moving the pictures into Adobe After Effects and retaking pictures that were too wobbly or not up to par. I found royalty-free music to match the mood of our video, and our editor team members added it into the final video.
Finally, we submitted at around 6:40 P.M. on October 5th, 20 minutes before our 24 hours were up. I was exhausted, exhilarated, and just utterly in awe of how we did that. We, a group of juniors who had all just enrolled in the introductory hand drawn animation course, completed a 30 second animation video in just less than 24 hours. And I think that’s amazing.
Final Results
Feel free to view the final product here:
And here is the compilation of our finished frames in one beautiful picture!
All of our watercolor frames