In March 2020, the entire world was (rightfully) cancelled. Unfortunately, this meant the suspension of animation festivals, including the wonderful Cardiff Animation Festival, which Chicken Fruit was excited to be attending.
Fortunately, there was one element of Cardiff Animation Festival that could be carried out from our animation dens at home: the Cardiff Quick Draw challenge, wherein participants must make a short film within 48 hours. The theme is given on 7pm Friday (this year’s theme was “green”) and a final film must be submitted by 7pm on Sunday.
And we did it! We made a film in 48 hours! But how?
FRIDAY, 7PM – THE THEME
The theme was announced. Green! We couldn’t think of a single green thing. We scrubbed out all the work we’d had on our office whiteboard and replaced it with a mind-map of green. We also put a call out on our instagram stories for suggestions. One of our friends helpfully supplied a list; another one sent a message that just said “shrek.”
With this, we made a list of possible film ideas:
waiting for a green light at a junction or the start of a race
propagating houseplants while working from home (#StayAtHome)
drinking green tea to calm a busy life
a greengrocer and an unloved green apple.
We were slightly wary of making anything that felt a bit too close to the all-too-current COVID-19 crisis, so we decided to avoid the films that referenced stay-at-home anxiety. We also didn’t want to make anything too similar to any of the other films; we thought the “green light” idea was a bit too risky. Also, Lindsey (who goes out of her way to buy the last potato in the supermarket to make sure it’s not lonely) really loved the idea of a sad green apple.
With the story locked down, Lindsey became hyperfocused on the perfect colour scheme for the film.
FRIDAY 8PM – THE COLOURS
Listen, it was totally worth the hour Lindsey spent picking colours. As a producer, it’s not often Lindsey gets super involved in the creative side of things, and she took her job very seriously.
We knew we wanted a simple muted colour palette. We also knew we wanted a brighter green as a contrast, so it would pop whenever it was in shot. We hunkered down on the Coolors app website (which we are now obsessed with) and generated dozens of possibilities.
After much mixing, matching and moaning, we settled on these six:
FRIDAY 9PM – THE CHARACTER DESIGNS
Usually, when people find out we work in animation, they say, “Oh, like Pixar?” and we go, “No, not really like Pixar, Pixar is quite a large company, and we are two people,” and they go, “Oh, so like cartoons?” and we have to make ourselves sound a lot less cool by talking about how, mainly, we make adverts and TV title sequences that ultimately get cut from the final edit due to time constraints.
But: we love cartoons! We’ve been itching to make something really CUTE to balance out all the work we’ve done for paint adverts and darts companies. So, Lindsey had another important job: to pick her favourite cute little faces for our fruit and veg.
We wanted one of the pieces of fruit and veg (which later we simplified to just apples to save time) to be the lonely one left in the cart at the end of the day. We trialed a few designs where it was misshapen or bruised, but decided that, ultimately, it was already “different” enough because it was green (and we really didn’t want to accidentally make any kind of commentary on people/fruits with disabilities). Also, we wanted it to be recognisably apple-like and didn’t want to spent too much time perfecting something that was just the right amount of misshapen.
Some abandoned fruit designs
For the greengrocer, we tried to steer away from the traditional/overused feminine shape of the triangle dress with a young, thin lady in it. We considered making her absolutely hench (she’s carrying boxes of apples all day!) but eventually settled on a slightly older woman, nice and short and round, like a bean.
And for the cart, we combined a whole bunch of ideas from various traditional veg carts.
FRIDAY 10PM – THE STORYBOARDS
We knew we wanted to jump straight into the animatic first thing Saturday, so we made rough storyboards in Procreate to make that process easier. Fortunately, we had a fairly solid idea of where we wanted the film to go, and also we knew it was only going to be around a minute long, so there was limited scope for complex subplots.
Then, knowing the battle we had ahead of us, we went to sleep.
SATURDAY 8AM–4PM – THE ANIMATIC, THE MUSIC & THE RIGGING
We woke up on Saturday at the very reasonable hour of 8am (cocky) and Jonny dug straight into the animatic. We had aimed to have it finished for around 11am and managed to get it finished by 11.45, which we were fairly happy with. Meanwhile, Lindsey swapped our green mind-map on the whiteboard for a shot list and trawled various royalty-free music websites for a song that was cheerfully whimsical, but with a sad bit. She will be hearing ukuleles and glockenspiels in her dreams for years to come.
https://audiojungle.net/item/sweet-n-dreamy-with-vocals/5479973
The first edit of the animatic was exactly a minute long. The best song that Lindsey found was 2m19s. While Jonny modelled and rigged the characters in Cinema 4D, Lindsey got to work in Final Cut Pro re-timing the animatic and doing some rough reworking of the music. Eventually, after having lengthened a few shots and expanded the middle montage, our final length was 1m26. You can see the animatic and how it compares with the final film in the video at the top of the page.
MODELLING & RIGGING
We used Cinema4D’s Volume Builder function to build our main character. This allowed us to throw together simple pieces of geometry into the volume builder to create smooth surfaces quickly.
As we had limited time to put her together, she wasn’t rigged in a traditional 3D way. Instead, we used mesh deformers to bend, warp, squash and stretch the poor thing.
Bend deformer used on the fingers.
Also note how:
(a) this is a hand on a stick, not a real character, and
(b) the hand isn’t actually holding the sign; the sign is holding the hand (the hand is parented to the sign and then the sign rotates).
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* MOVIE MAGIC *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧
SATURDAY 4PM – THE RENDER TESTS
We knew that render time could really eat into our 48-hour time limit if we weren’t careful. Most of the work we do as a studio is ray-traced 3D animation, which can often take up 30 mins a frame to render. Given that we were pushing 1500 frames, that was an entire month(!) over budget.
We decided very early on to use cel shading to render the film. Not only would this cut down on render time dramatically, but would also give the film a cartoonish look, adding even more cute fun to our use of kawaii faces and upbeat music.
Cel shading also meant we could get away with lots of time-saving cheats that wouldn’t hold up otherwise – body parts could intersect, big cubes could be used to block out colours, and simple shapes could be used instead of actual body parts (as seen in the stick-hand gif above).
With all our time-saving hacks in place, the render time was going to be under 10 secs a frame – far quicker than we’d anticipated – so that bought us a huge chunk of time on the other end.
SATURDAY 6PM – THE ANIMATING
We, uh, didn’t start animating until around 6pm on Saturday, just over 24 hours to go. We decided we’d do the animation in three stages:
ORANGE: better than the animatic, but not by much (no walk cycles, no squash and stretch, no real character movement at all)
GREEN: yeah, not bad (but if we had more time, there’s more we would do)
IRIDIUM (or, for those who haven’t played far too much Stardew Valley recently, PURPLE): we’d be pretty happy with this even if we didn’t only have 48 hours.
Thanks to our incredibly speedy animator-in-chief, Jonny, by 11pm on Saturday, we had most shots already on orange quality.
There is a reason we are animators and not mathematicians, see if you can spot it.
We are also fortunate enough that we have a “client sofa” (an Ikea sofabed) less than a foot away from Jonny’s desk; on Saturday evening, we set that up so Jonny (as a “night person”) could do a few more hours of work while Lindsey (not really an any time person but especially not a night one) passed out in the other room.
SUNDAY MORNING – THE FINAL SHOT
Crunch time! We woke up early-ish and got straight back into it. By 9am, we’d started rolling out some iridium (purple) dots on our shot list and were down to only one red, which was the final shot.
We knew that, if there was any shot we needed to be as perfect as possible, it was this one, as it delivers the punchline to the film. So, we knuckled down and spent a good few hours trying to get it right. Jonny had great fun making our gentle little beanlike greengrocer look as ugly as possible as she chomps down on our poor little apple friend.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON – THE REST OF THE FILM
By 1.30pm we still had 11/32 shots that were orange, but we also had 13 iridium, so we were feeling okay. At this point, we were rendering and backing up every hour or so, because to have a technology failure would have been crushing, so that ate up a fair amount of time. But, at 42 hours in, the breaks were welcome.
We relied on some of Cinema 4D’s MoGraph tools to make our job easier. The apples bouncing in the cart would have taken ages to animate properly, but we cheated and used a Random Effector to position and rotate them. This gave these scenes a little extra something-something without taking up too much of our time.
By 5pm, all the orange shots had been upgraded to green. For each green shot, we had some notes about what we would improve if we had time, and we worked through them using a system entirely based on what we felt like doing at the time.
We absolutely expected something to go wrong at any minute, but most of Sunday went disconcertingly smoothly. We were aiming to have everything wrapped up by 6pm so we had enough time to render and send; things were going so well that we allowed ourselves until 6.20pm just to update one last shot from green to iridium (the squash and stretch on the green apple when it bounced) and then, suddenly, that was it! We done a film!
Of course, there are things that we’d have done differently if we’d had more time, but overall, we’re really pleased with how it turned out; by the end of the weekend, all our shots were marked with an iridium dot on our whiteboard (though we were throwing them around a bit fast and loose by the end).
We were so pleased to be a part of the Cardiff Quick Draw challenge, and will absolutely be taking part in future if it runs again! It was a really fun experience to be working alongside so many others on such a ridiculous project, and we loved chatting to the other animators on the dedicated Slack channel. (Although, Lindsey made it to 2020 without having a Slack account, so that’s that achievement out of the window.) Huge thank you to Quick Draw Tim for putting it all together!
See you next year, green team! 💚
