So I recently had the pleasure of helping to make Lipscomb’s second ever animated short film! It’s only 30 seconds long, but did I mention we made it in 24 hours? I’ll link the final short below before I dive into the story –
Like a surprising amount of other things in the Lipscomb animation department, this film started due to Tom and Tony’s sibling rivalry. When Tom heard about this 24 hour student animation contest, he promptly challenged Tony that Lipscomb could make a better film than his students at Azusa Pacific. He did all this before telling us, his own students, about the contest. Clearly, Tom was more excited about the challenge than any of us. After all, he wasn’t going to be the one stuck in the animation lab for 24 hours. Which, on second thought, is only a few hours short of the Lipscomb student’s typical workday experience. Everyone also had regular homework that they would have to do in the groggy days that followed the competition. It was an especially bad weekend for Aedan Peterson and I since Hutchmoot was happening at the same time and NICHOLAS KOLE would be there, the first chance I would have to meet him in person since I developed an unhealthy obsess- *ahem* I mean great appreciation for his work. So it was going to be a surprise if Lipscomb could even muster a team to challenge Azusa in the first place. However, once we found out that there were several good prizes on the line, a few of us were willing to make some sacrifices. The winners would get subscriptions to TVPaint, and more notably, a mystery prize pack from a major studio. And that, in the words of Jeff Probst, was a reward worth playing for.
After leaving halfway through Kole’s panel at Hutchmoot (I was pretty upset) we arrived back at Lipscomb and gathered around the computer to get the word on what our official prompt would be. To prevent early starts, all teams were required to work from the same prompt delivered at the beginning of the 24 hours. After listing a bunch of recent social justice advocates, the prompt concluded with:
In 24 hours make a 30-second animated film depicting a strong point of view educating to your audience about the need to have empathy. Whether it be race, gender, lifestyle, social mobility, disability, geography, or even species, we all face challenges in making our reality be understood. Animate an experience that will help convey to the audience what it is really like to speak your truth.
Essentially, we had to show someone speaking out against the majority to defend their beliefs and/or a minority group. Although that’s a noble thing for our nameless protagonist to do, we encountered quite a few issues in adapting this idea into a 30 second short. First of all, this idea of loveable-rebel-vs-unfeeling-majority is an incredibly common cliche in modern animated storytelling (think Smallfoot, Zootopia, Bee Movie, Steven Universe). We were also a little philosophically unsettled by the prompt – nowhere did it include searching for the truth amidst controversy or loving your enemy, just the importance of pushing your particular point of view. And don’t even get me started on “speaking your truth.” How could we find a take on this idea that would be sensitive and inventive – and fit in the 30 second required time limit? We went to our “writers’ room” (the fashion design room) and tried to come up with visual metaphors and find if there was a way to subvert the prompt in a refreshing and truthful way. We wanted to show a story of two sides coming together, not an underdog beatdown. Someone came up with the visual metaphor of a fire in combat with 1,000 raindrops, which after a decisive drop in temperature became the story we used for the film. We liked the idea of a role reversal – at first the fire appears to be the bad guy, killing hundreds of snowflakes for seemingly no reason. We then learn that the fire is the only thing keeping a young girl alive, and it’s actually the snowflakes who are the insensitive ones. Once the snowflakes understand the fire’s point of view, they join it in its mission of protection in a way neither side could accomplish on its own. Overall, the story felt a lot more wholesome than showing some outcast “sticking it to the man.”
We then moved on to the visual side of the film. Lipscomb only had one 5 man team in the competition, but I think it was a great combination of people to work with. It also meant that we had the whole lab to ourselves :). Aedan, Hayley Evans, and I got to work on character design and later moved into animation once we got the storyboards from Naomi Bethel. I was particularly happy with how the fire design progressed – we took a lot of inspiration from the Grim Matchstick Cuphead fight and he turned out delightfully grumpy.
Fire Model Sheet by Aedan Peterson
Naomi’s boards fit our much-too-long story into the 30 seconds pretty admirably with some great expression work. The igloo gag at the end was all her idea and directly based on one of her sketches. We all essentially co-directed it, but I acted as team captain/producer and tried to keep everything on track. I helped a bit with character design and animated the first couple snow shots and the final igloo shot based on Naomi’s boards (and recorded the igloo’s voice in a different room so no one could watch me make that sound). Throughout most of the process Audrey Wagnon was working on these really cool backgrounds, getting a really nice pastel feel reminiscent of the Brother Bear visdev. Here’s some of my favorites.
Background Art by Audrey Wagnon
She later handled most of the editing.
We all had a lot of fun at the beginning and end of the process – the middle was pretty rough and we all got a little delirious. I was worried for a while that we wouldn’t be able to finish in time. Our animation lab is in a basement, so the passing of time grew very ethereal. Since I didn’t see the sun move in the sky, it felt like the day didn’t really pass. We finished the film 30 minutes before the deadline. Most of us then had a CG modeling assignment to turn in that night, so no rest for the weary!
We all were pretty happy with what we were able to make. For most of us, it was the first animated short film we had ever made. After watching some of the other entries, we realized that we probably should have picked a story that fit more neatly into the 30 seconds and required less quick cuts. We didn’t win any of the major awards, but we did place in the top 50 out of 200+ teams, 34th to be exact. Tom said we beat Azusa, which made him happy. All things considered, not a bad first attempt. And the Kole story ends happily as well – I was able to talk to him and his wife Erika on Sunday night after the challenge was over and I had gotten some sleep. It was really a God-sent opportunity, and I tried not to geek out too much!
Stay warm,
dh
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