Ibuku

"Ibuku" is an independent student film created as a love letter to my mom, inspired by the numerous of old VHS video clips from my childhood. The film makes use of TVPaint 11, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects and GarageBand.

Synopsis

As the protagonist grows up, so do cameras. From camcorders of the late 90s, early digital point-and-shoots, to smartphone cameras. Firing up their old camcorder, the protagonist reminisces some memories of their mom while reflecting on the monumental task that is motherhood.

Concept

Early on, the art direction was steered towards having backgrounds look like watercolour.

Upon further reconsideration, I chose to pursue a more painterly look.

Character Design

Initially, the character designs were somewhat realistic in proportion. But eventually, I attempted to push the proportions a little to help each of the characters stand out more.

At this stage, I thought using larger shapes will help to make the job of animating the characters far easier.

After a few iterations, I settled on this line up of characters and went to work on cleaning up the designs for a turntable.

Storyboards

The next stage was to create a storyboard and an animatic to accompany it.

Colour script

Working off of the storyboard and concept art, a colour script was done up to aid in the creation of the background and compositions.

Background art

Here are some of my favourite backgrounds and some of their layouts.

The same background but different times of day.

Animation

Done in TVPaint 11

Rough animation

Clean up

Colour and composite

Compositing

Compositing was done in Adobe After Effects 

Soundtrack

What I feel that makes "Ibuku" unique is the soundtrack, which I created using GarageBand during my downtime. Because this short film meant something to me, I felt that it was appropriate to give it a more personal touch.