Take it eaZzZy - 2D-animated short film

This short film is my first step into the world of animation and digital art as a traditional realism artist. Animating has fascinated me for so long, the ability to give my drawing and ideas life through movement - to me it seems as close to magic as it's gets. So I decided to give it a try through this project! I still have a long way to go, but I'm now certain I want to pursue this art form.

I don't have much process material to present, since I was completely unfamiliar with the workflow and ended up...improvising, for the most of it. I figured out things like character design and animation as I went along, and unfortunately didn't think about keeping my sketches of the backgrounds. 

Storyboard

Some pages of the storyboard/color key.

Backgrounds

A couple finished backgrounds. While painting I paid close attention to the separate layers, to ensure effects like parallax and putting characters in between objects would work.

Challenges and more details about the project

The music was what inspired the entire film. When I heard the piece for the first time, I saw a scene with a bear maniacally chasing and swatting at a fly emerge infront of me. I found it so hilarious I had to make it into a short, despite that timing the animation to match the music while fitting the entire storyline was incredibly challenging (seeing that I wasn't even familiar with the fundamentals of animating).

I made this short as a part of my final project in high school. I go to a class specialising in media, so while we don't learn animation, we got to choose the project freely as long as it's connected to film/graphic design. Because of the tight deadline I had to rush the animating part. To finish in time I had to stop doing cleanup versions of every frame, which led to the rough, unrefined lines. However, I tried to match the shift between clean and messy lines with the storyline; the style gets progressively more rough as the tension builds (and the bear gets a nervous breakdown).