Group final for a college cinematography class. I worked with two other classmates to create this animated short, and I think it's the most stressful yet most fun assignment I've ever done. The original idea for the short came from the three of us going "What would happen if we put our characters together in a room and made them assemble IKEA furniture?" and the rest of the story unfolded from there.
After drawing the characters interacting a bunch in MSPaint and seeing what kind of dynamic between them formed, we decided to go for a Tom and Jerry-type slapstick cartoon, also drawing inspiration from Spongebob and Ren and Stimpy.
​The original assignment only called for a 90-second long short, but we had so many ideas that we went way beyond that and ended up with a four minute long animatic instead. As a result we were on a massive time crunch for the month and a half we spent working on it, but by setting deadlines for ourselves, pulling all-nighters, and just having fun with the project, we managed to get it done in time.
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Besides animating, coloring and compositing, I was also responsible for creating character sheets:
storyboarding:
and some of the backgrounds:
...as well as this frame:
At the end of the semester, the finished animation was shown at my school's "Movie Night", and I won't forget the giddiness I felt hearing the laughs from the audience (or the relief that our cartoon was actually funny to other people and not just the three of us). I learned so much from this project, not just from the process of making it, but from the people I worked on it with- Em and Ian- as well. It's an experience I'll never ever forget.