How to Make an Animated Film (Flash film, 2010)

(Flash, 2010)

This is my flash film, made at VFS during a year in the Classical animation program.
The whole thing developed in less than a month.

______________________________________________

A little about the project:

The idea took a while to settle for a couple reasons... but it was so long, that I ended up leaving too little time for it's execution in the end. So, the character was built in 5 days, and animated in 2.

Sound design
I tried recording the voices by myself but the files had too much noise on them. DIP instructor Jim Inkster helped me record everything again, in a noise isolated room. He also helped me with the final editing of the audio. I wanted elevator music for it.
I used my voice for it, because I was running out of time, and because I thought it was the best thing to do since, from the beggining, it was my inner dialogue what was going on.

Story
I was gonna make a film about cute tiny bugs from a ficticious planet habitated by cute child-like creatures called "Gunis". The story had no ending... nor story... It was gonna be like a little documentary. And... nothing really interesting nor fun happened at all. Thinking about a climax for that story, I scribbled a storyboard with this idea on a couple pages in my sketchpad.
For "How to make an animated film", it is actually me having an inner dialogue and scolding myself, what brought to those papers the storyboard. I showed it to some classmates, and they found it amusing, so I showed it to our flash instructor, Edwin Poon. He told me to do this idea instead.
The initial storyboard is longer and the story changed a little for it's final version. A day before the deadline, I realized I wasn't gonna finish everything on time, so I re-built the structure of the story. The original one had a single and longer dialogue. This one is divided in 5 different blocks, and each block contains a fragment of the original dialogue. And although the story was altered, the main idea remained, but the changes made the message stronger.

Art Direction

I was gonna use different colors for the clothes, eyes, and hair, of the character, but using different hues of the same color was the less distracting thing to do. I tried using different blues, yellows, browns and other colors. I liked it best in pink.
I also wanted to use soft colors for the environment, and make it a room or office or park... but since it was inner dialogue, I thought a plain texture worked out the best. Also, no other color than a dark one was good to make the character pop out in screen as I wanted. If I was gonna use soft colors for the background, I would have needed to use darker ones for the character. And I wanted her to look girly, cute, adorable, funny and delicate. Darker colors would have done any of those words become an opposite.
To make everything blend in properly, I used a soft-yellow highly-transparent screen over the whole film.