(Note: this post talks about our most recent short film, Look After Yourself. If you haven’t watched it yet, you can do so here. It’s only 2 minutes long, don’t worry.)
We participated in the Cardiff Quick Draw challenge back in March 2020 and came out with our short film The Greengrocer. The process was a lot of fun – and we came out of it having made a short film! – so of course we signed up when Tim Hawkins and Cardiff Animation Festival announced another Quick Draw challenge at the beginning of October 2020.
The theme for the previous Quick Draw challenge was “green”. To try to prepare for October’s challenge, we put our little noggins together and realised that the previous poster showed a bunch of green pencils in a green plant pot. So, prior to the announcement of the theme, we fixated on the October Quick Draw poster, which showed a cactus with pencil spikes.
October 2020 Quick Draw poster – by Tim Hawkins
From this, we wildly speculated that the theme was maybe something being strong? Or dry? Or spiky/sharp? Or something growing??
Bizarrely – and probably completely coincidentally – we weren’t far off the mark. At 8pm on Friday October 2nd, the theme was announced: REGROWTH. We had 48 hours to make a film about it.
FRIDAY
We started with a spider diagram of anything vaguely related to “regrowth” that we could possibly think of. Our list included everything from weed control to David Tennant’s chopped-off hand in the 2005 Doctor Who Christmas special.
From this, we came up with three possible stories:
Regrowing a tail – A person has a tail and is embarrassed about it. They cut it off every day, but it keeps regrowing. Eventually they learn to love it and accept themselves.
Regrowing a collection – A lonely person has a collection that gets ruined by a storm/extreme weather. They’re sad and feel more alone than ever. Then one by one, their neighbours leave new items for their collection. Their collection gets rebuilt and the person knows their neighbours are looking out for them.
Regrowing as a person – An old woman is sad and lonely. One day, she finds a tiny version of herself who starts to look after her and encourage her into a healthier routine. The tiny version of the old woman grows bigger and bigger the more the old lady starts to feel loved and more like herself again.
We made a pro/con list for each of these to try to figure out which one we should go for.
We decided against the tail story because of the potential complexity of making a morning routine sequence – plus we figured that regrowing body parts would be a fairly common route that people might take.
We loved the idea of regrowing a beloved collection, but ultimately decided against it just because of time restraints – it would mean drawing lots of elements to make the collection look big enough before it was ruined, plus we’d have to draw whatever event caused the collection to get destroyed (a big wave/a storm/a fire). We only had 48 hours!!
In the end, we went with the regrowing old lady idea – though, when we tried to explain it to a friend via voice note, it sounded incredibly ridiculous and needed a full minute just to explain the plot, which did not bode well for making the full film in a single weekend.
Settling on an idea took us until 9pm. We still had a few hours to take advantage of, so we started to think about what we wanted the film to look like.
We’ve made a lot of green/beige/blue content this year, so we really wanted something more towards the red/pink side of the spectrum. We also knew we wanted it to be soft and pastelly, because it’s 2020 and that’s just what our hearts need right now.
We played around with several options using our colour-picking saviour Coolors, then put together our own palette (including highlight and shadow colours) based off our favourites.
Meanwhile, Jonny was putting together rough storyboards so we had an idea of how many shots we needed to achieve our dream. By midnight on Friday (4 hours into the challenge), we had a shot list of 30 shots. Last time we had 32 shots, so we knew this wasn’t impossible. With this cheerful thought in mind, we went to bed.
SATURDAY
Like last time, we were pretty cocky with our sleep schedule and crawled out of bed at a very respectable 8.30am, which we would absolutely come to regret on Sunday afternoon. Still, by 10am, we had a rough animatic from the storyboards, and had scraped together enough reference images of animated older women that we could finalise a design for our main character.
Our final character design sketch
With the animatic and character design in place, Lindsey started putting together a sound edit while Jonny began to make the character in 3D.
SOUND
For the music, we knew we wanted something simple that had elements of sadness, loneliness and hope. We’ve also listened to enough Best Relaxing Piano Studio Ghibli Complete Collection this year that we were leaning towards softer piano melodies.
Last Quick Draw, we found our dream music after about an hour of searching. This time we found it so much quicker, as the saviour of online video everywhere, Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech, pulled through and had the perfect track – we particularly liked how the piano melody started off alone, then became more complex when the tiny old lady appeared.
It was only 1m30s long, and our animatic was over 2 mins, so we had to do a bit of incredibly clunky sound editing, but eventually we got it to approximately where we wanted it to be. We also trawled through freesound.org and threw on some basic sound effects – a mumble effect for the TV, the phone ringing, a knocking sound, the slide of the window opening, some nature ambience and a big deep inhale.
We found most of the sound effects easily enough, but the inhale options were driving us up the wall – NOBODY had BLOWN their NOSE before recording themselves. We did not want the sound of someone else’s snot on our short film!! So we just recorded that one ourselves on an iPhone. High tech stuff at Chicken Fruit HQ.
We also ideally wanted an older woman’s voice at the end of the short, when the main character had grown confident enough to answer the phone again. From the beginning, we ideally wanted to feature Jonny’s grandma in this starring role. For this, we broke out the high tech equipment again – we gave her a ring and recorded her on speakerphone using the default iPhone voice notes app. Thanks again, Jean! ❤️
3D CHARACTER
We have a fair amount of experience in making a 3D character rig in Cinema4D, so creating our main character in this way (rather than hand-drawn) was absolutely a time-saving device. This was doubly the case because we had two identical main characters – they use the same rig, just with their clothes recoloured.
After a couple of test renders of the rough grainy textured look, we decided on doing all the colouring and shading in Adobe After Effects. So, we would export a garish red/green/blue render from C4D, take the colour values as a matte in After Effects and use them to colour each piece individually. We knew all along that this method would add a good couple of hours of render time to the end of the project, but we felt that it really suited the feel of the film, so it was worth it.
Raw Cinema4D render
C4D render coloured and shaded in After Effects
By 1.30pm, we’d made our main characters’ 3D rigs, we’d cut our shot list down to 27 – including the title and credits, so really it was only 25 – and needed to get down to business actually making the dang film.
For the rest of Saturday, Jonny blocked out shots and animated the 3D character against plain backgrounds, and Lindsey settled down with Procreate to make the little text animations appear for the title, credits and a few onomatopoeic sound effect words.
Most of our character animation was quite simple – her limbs were rigged, and her head was on a pivot. We also spent a solid hour setting up a nice slider rig for her facial expressions, which ultimately we used on maybe three shots. But it’s a beautiful slider and we regret nothing.
Mostly, her movements were small – head tilts and shuffley feet – but we had great fun watching videos of aerobics lessons aimed at older people to get the movements right in the exercising scenes.
We had a bit of a late night on Saturday – the scale of what we were trying to pull off was beginning to dawn on us – but both of us were tucked up in bed by a fairly respectable 1.30am.
SUNDAY
We emerged on Sunday morning dazed and confused and still with another 12 hours to go. We still hadn’t animated the 3D character in most of the shots, but we knew we needed to start working on the other elements – it would be better to have a motionless character in a shot that made sense than a well-animated character interacting with nothing.
We first went through our animatic and made a list of every object we would need to make. Then we made them in 2D using Adobe Illustrator – and, to make sure it was a visually unified universe, we then put them through the same shading process as the 3D character using After Effects. Given the toll this grainy look had on our render time, we pre-rendered all of these, then put them back into the project as .mov files to save time at the end.
Some of our 2D elements
By 4pm, panic was beginning to creep in. We’d run some tests and figured that, even with all of our shortcuts, our most complex shots were taking 7 minutes to render. If we allowed 7 minutes for every shot, we would need 3 hours to render. That would mean we had to be finished by 5pm, which was, uh, not gonna happen.
Even if we allowed 5 minutes per shot, since not every shot was the same level of complexity, we’d need 2 hours to render – again, unlikely. BUT, some of our shots were quite simple and only took 1 minute to render, so there was potentially room for pushing our self-imposed deadline a bit? But not much room! Not enough room!!
One of our simple shots – 1-min render time
A more complex shot – 7-min render :(
As we approached 6pm – 2 hours left – we started rendering shots as we went. We figured we’d rather have half the shots looking good than none at all, but it did mean there were long frustrating periods of time where we couldn’t animate things while we waited for other shots to finish rendering. All we could do was post frustrated gifs on our Twitter and flood our insta stories with ever more desperate updates.
During our first Quick Draw in March, we finished the film with an hour to spare, allowed ourselves an extra 20 minutes to tweak bits, then sent it over extremely leisurely. It was nbd. We were extremely chill.
This time round, we finished the final render 15 minutes before the deadline, and still had to export the file to a size small enough that we could upload and send it. We submitted to WeTransfer with 13 minutes left. The upload took 7 minutes. We made it with only 6 minutes to spare. If ONE THING had gone wrong – if Virgin Media had been as unreliable as they have been all year – we would have been out of the race.
But, tragically, we think the stress was worth it; Look After Yourself looks so much more polished than The Greengrocer, even if it is still pretty simple in design/execution. With Quick Draw challenges, there’s always going to be more we’d’ve liked to have done if we’d just had an extra hour/day/week – but that’s part of the fun! It’s so easy to build up projects in your head so you never even start them. Then, once you start them, it’s easy to spend so much time second-guessing yourself that you never actually finish.
Without Quick Draw, we wouldn’t have made a film at all that weekend. Thanks to Tim and the rest of the Cardiff Animation Festival team, we have two new short films under our belt this year. And each one taught us new ways of streamlining our process, of working together and of the importance of a giant bowl of Korean food to keep you going when the deadline is approaching.
All the films made that weekend are still available to watch on the Cardiff Animation Festival YouTube channel. We would recommend watching all of them – the quality of work was incredible, and we’re so honoured to have our film stand alongside all the other amazing pieces that were created for the challenge.
Watch Look After Yourself again below!
