LIAM - Solo short film

Hello, I'm Anaïs and this is my solo short film done in my 3rd (out of 5) year at MoPA!

The theme was "blow and make a wish" and the initial time given to create the project was 4 months. The covid pandemic hit during the production and turned the 4 months into a chaotic year with a lot of uncertainties.

Everything was done by myself, with the exception of an auto-rig used for both characters and the music.

Story - "blow and make a wish"

A large theme, but since we had a lot of freedom I chose to link it to another theme I liked, monsters. Naturally the concept of a monster under the bed came to my mind, and the little boy, Liam is scared of him. For his birthday, Liam blows a candle on his birthday cake, wishing to not be scared anymore of Melvin, the monster under his bed. As they grow older kids simply stop being scared of imaginary monsters.

Pre-production

I did some quick environment and lighting tests to have a more precise idea on how the film will look.

I also researched some designs for the two characters, Melvin is inspired by wolves, demon and skulls while Liam was simply inspired by my little cousin!

I tried to stay simple but efficient for my storyboard.

Production

Everything was done by myself here as well, with the exception of the use of an auto-rig for both characters.

I enjoyed more the modeling and texturing than the lighting and animation, but I did my very best on every aspects, from this painted wooden floor, to this little details like this electrical outlet you probably haven't noticed, the little drawings are also references to other films by my classmates!

Post production

I decided at the end to change colors from blue-ish to green-ish, compositing was definitely one of the most satisfying parts of the project, the raw images were very basic and I had a lot of fun giving more personality to my short with Nuke!

The end!

I've learned a lot during this project, 3D animation was still very new to me at the time, I wish I could have done better of course but I'm still proud of what I did and also glad that I managed to finish it with the pandemic making this production so chaotic!

Thank you for watching!