In March 2022, we took part in our fourth Quick Draw weekend with Cardiff Animation Festival.
The Quick Draw event challenges teams to make an animated film in 48 hours around a particular theme. The clock starts as soon as the theme is released – usually on a Friday evening.
Since previous Quick Draw challenges have helped us out of creative slumps (or have given us something to post on Instagram, at the very least), we signed up to participate in the March 2022 event without a second thought. But on the Friday evening when the theme (“blend”) was announced, we were not feeling it. After a busy and stressful work week, the thought of diving into an intense weekend of filmmaking was not the one.
We stuck it out for a few hours, throwing around ideas about robot baristas and what happens in the inside of a vacuum cleaner, but ultimately we were tired and uninspired and decided to pack it in. We fired up Disney+ and watched Turning Red, then went to bed.
SATURDAY
We woke up with no intention of taking part in Quick Draw. But over our morning coffee (with 15 out of the 48 hours already gone), we found ourselves spitballing about the mental images produced by different wholesome candle scents, and what horrors might come from blending two of them. Cosy Fireplace + Tranquil Pine Forest = Forest Fire. Lumberjack Axe + Basket of Puppies = a lot of trouble with the RSPCA. That sort of thing.
But most of that felt like a warped manifestation of our unhealthily stressed mental states than any sort of punchline. Then we thought – what if a character combined two scents, but instead of being scared by the resulting combination, he was, erm, intrigued?
Thus the concept of our posh little piggy was born: an uptight gent with an excellent sense of smell and some niche personal interests. It was a bizarre idea – the sort of thing that we were pretty sure nobody apart from us would find funny. But we giggled every time we thought of it, so by 10am on Saturday, we were back in the studio designing a deviant little pig.
After a couple of hours, we had a basic skeleton pig rig. We had even less time than usual, so we weren’t precious about intersecting geometry – his arms and legs are rigged separately and clip through the main body, but we knew he didn’t move a huge amount, so for our purposes it would be fine.
It was at this point that we threw together the roughest animatic you’ve ever seen. It’s always tempting to skip the animatic stage when time is limited – it can feel almost pointless to make it once, and then make it again – but animatics consistently help us get a better sense of story, and help us cut down and simplify our shots.
For example, in the animatic, our main character wakes up in each new landscape and the camera pans in on him and spins around to reveal the scenery. Upon watching the animatic back, we realised the extra camerawork was unnecessary and muddled the idea. We replaced it with a Hitchcock zoom, which we blended with motion blur in the final edit.
After trimming shots at the animatic stage, we ended up with only 17 to do, including title and credits. Previous Quick Draws have seen us work through 25-35 shots each time – even though by this point, we were already into Saturday afternoon (with the deadline on Sunday evening), the rest of the work felt doable.
To further ease our progress, we filmed reference footage for every shot – another Quick Draw first for us. This cut out a lot of guesswork from our timings and character animation, and also importantly added to the fun of the weekend.
We stayed up late on Saturday and managed to get all the shots of the pig in the candle shop animated and queued up for 3D rendering overnight. For each shot, we cut out the background and only rendered Mr Pig on alpha to cut down on render time. For some extra secondary animation to make it feel a little more polished, we added a subtle jiggle deformer to his ears. Knowing that we’d wake up on Sunday with all our candle shop shots rendered, we went to bed in the early ours of the morning feeling very smug.
SUNDAY
Our PC forced an update at 2am, so only one shot rendered. We should have known better to be smug during a Quick Draw weekend. We brought it on ourselves.
With the PC working overtime to catch up, we started work on the dream scenes. Our render time was severely limited, so we made everything out of 2D stills rendered from 3D, which we composited in After Effects with some Z depth.
While Jonny was making trees, grass, birthday cakes, unicorns and rainbows, Lindsey was working on a rough pass of music and sound design. We are definitely not audio professionals – whenever we do our own sound design, we definitely fudge it a bit. Such fudgings in this project include using the same sniffing and birdsong sound effects that we used in Look After Yourself, the sound of the basket handles falling down being the same sound as the axe chopping wood, and the pig grunts at the end being a squeaky dog toy, not an actual pig.
We also recorded the unnerving “Happy birthday, Jonathan” dialogue by each saying the line into a regular old iPhone voice notes recorder – then we layered them up in Audacity, threw some weird effects on them by clicking random buttons and seeing what they did, and then reversing the whole thing for an extra layer of the uncanny.
Another fun bit of audio trickery – we included some wood-chopping sound effects to the wide view of the lumberjack forest shot, but didn’t actually animate any wood being chopped. The hope was that it tricks the viewer’s brain into thinking that shot was animated without us having to do the actual work.
The last shot we had to finish was the unicorn-lumberjack-pig-centaur eldritch horror: a key element which we had yet to touch. So with a few hours to go, Jonny built the creature with elements we’d already made, mixed it with some C4D Volume Builder pecs, and lit it with some sinister up-lighting.
Initially, we wanted to go even further with this scene, and create a custom unnerving background with trees made of dripping candy floss, but due to the time constraints, we just hue-shifted the trees we already had, downloaded a stock photo of some sky, and used some dark and garish colours to contrast with the other pastelly scenes.
The last step was adding the single-frame backgrounds to each of the candle shop scenes. With some hindsight we would have loved to have built on the background some more, but with only an hour to spare (and with not having actually tested to see if the backgrounds would line up correctly!), we had to go with the basic shelf we started with.
Our PC was still working through the render queue, so we had to cut down on some other ideas we’d’ve liked to include, like a title sequence made from candle wax, better credits, and other subtle character animations.
But with these corners cut, the PC eventually spat out its final shot, and we managed to submit our film to Quick Draw Tim with half an hour to spare.
Our goal with every Quick Draw challenge is to push ourselves to try something new. With Sniff Test, our goals were to make a film with a full 3D character and without a time-passing montage and to move away from the “gentle ukulele/piano soundtrack and a vaguely heartwarming story” plot that we have a tendency to fall back on. We reckon it’s safe to say we managed all three. Was the resulting sordid horror worth it? Opinions may differ – but we had fun making it, either way.
Sniff Test played at Cardiff Animation Festival in Chapter Cinema on Friday 8 April and Saturday 9 April 2022. All 46 films made that weekend are available to watch on the Cardiff Animation Festival YouTube channel, or you can watch Sniff Test alone on its page on our website.
