This project was a collaboration where I got to work in a variety of roles to create a short film with a few other graduate animation students over the span of ten weeks.
My first job on this project was as a character designer. I got to work right away on the two characters of the film - a grim reaper with a moth motif, and a little boy who has a terminal disease. After a few rounds of iteration and feedback, I was able to solidify the designs and create a set of turnarounds for each for modeling.
From there, I got to work on the environment and props. The majority of the film takes place within a hospital bedroom. I designed it to be full of symbolic elements of death and disease, as notated in the second picture, which could be disguised as children's toys.
With design finished, we moved on to asset creation. A lot of my time was spent on the props, both modeling them myself and checking the models of others. Some models needed to be redone, as they were either too high-poly or had other issues like n-gons, nonplanar faces, and more!
As producer, while I was doing this, I kept a spreadsheet of each asset's development, from concept, to modeling, to UV and texture!
I was able to create a simple texturing style for the environment and characters which made it much easier for our team to create a stylized look in Maya. These textures were created in Substance Painter, largely procedural, but with hand-painted highlights to create a storybook feeling. The bold colors added a sense of vivacity, but each piece also works in black-and-white.
Next, we moved on to animation! I created a sample environment scene for the animators to reference into their shots, which had all the elements laid out and textured properly, as well as a few basic lighting setups for the different scenes to ensure everyone's shots were consistent. I completed about 25 seconds of animation on my shots, and was able to take on extra shots that other people were unable to finish. I'm very proud that my montage shot was fully animated, while everyone else ran into issues which left theirs in blocking.
Finally, I was able to help out on the composite. Most things were done in Maya, but I added a little bit of film grain in post production, as well as color correction and a vignette. After that, everything was done!
I'm quite pleased with the final result and very proud to have been able to work on so many aspects of this film!
Exterior - raw render with lighting, atmosphere, and depth of field applied in Maya
