SHARE IT

"Share IT" is an animated short film that I made for my main project in Screen Arts (3D animation) from the Southern Institute of Technology New Zealand. The theme of my story is about friendship and how sharing something is much better, even though all the problems that mean.

Synopsis: Cucho is a thirsty tuatara on the side of the road who finds an addictive drink, but it belongs to Tom so, he jumps into the bike in order to steal the drink, however, the things are not easy and they will try to kill each other to get it back, but they do not realize something is coming so, they are going to share more than a can, maybe life maybe death.

Concept Art

The first idea of the story came up when I was riding my old motorcycle and I saw another motorcyclist with his dog traveling together so, I drew a sketch about it and always wanted to do something more. I would like to show some concept art that I made after that as well as character development.

Animatic

The original version of my short film had more than 60 shots I was happy with the edition, but it was too long I had to find a way to tell the same story with fewer shots so, I made a new edition using the most significative shots (without them the story does not work) and I ended up with a half time story, actually it was a very good exercise, I realized many of my previous shots were repetitive and helped me to manage and prioritize all the assets. 

Look & Dev

Since the beginning of this project, I was sure that I would need to optimize render time so, but mainly because my goal was the storytelling and animation, I wanted to make something complete even though I would give up some  technical aspects, however, I made the decision to keep the look as much simple and stylized as I could in order to gain time for other areas, for example, I used Human IK and blend shapes for rigging, surfacing was not a trouble, most of the shadings have just a bump map. 

Animation

I was really excited about animate all these shots, I did some tests before in order to fix the rigs, however, after made the re-cut of the story I got 30 shots to animate so, I started with the relevant ones, I made a list of the most complex to the simplest ones because I was running out of time, therefore, I needed to prioritize the shots. 

For the majority of the shot I had an idea of how the animation would be, but some of them I was not sure so, I came up recording myself in order to see if how difficult the actions can be. Some of the shots changed a lot from the storyboard, like the camera angle, timing, and orientation but, the main purpose did not change. One thing that I learned was about "continuity" because how finishes one action is the how starts in the next shot, for example when I was animating Cucho´s tail had a slow timing and with bouncing, but in the next shot his tail was faster and I animated it without bouncing, because I did that shot almost at the end and I did not consider it before going with the next shot.

 I make a breakdown of some animations because when I was drawing the storyboard I did not do the actions to see if they work, but once you do it helps to understand what is and what is might not possible. 

Compositing

Basically I used just the beauty pass combined with other layers for the compositing, I knew that my main goal was not about focused on compositing techniques so, I took advantage of it and one more time I decided to keep it simple in order to enhance the final image by playing safe with all the sources that I already knew at the moment. I made a breakdown of some final shots, but the rest of them have almost the same set of layers that I used. All the work done was made in After Effects.

I hope you like this project, I really enjoyed each stage of the process. Thanks for watching it.