Queerbaiting

“A woman being baited by love for others, until she gets hooked.”

Inspiration and Synopsis

I initially came up with the idea by making a pun out of the word “queerbaiting”, which will be explained in the film, and I also wanted to create a short film with more representation for LGBT+ members.

Our Synopsis-

"Morgan walks down a canal path looking for love, and encounters many people showing hopeful hints to their sexuality.

First is Noura who wears a rainbow pin like herself but rejects Morgan instantly. She then gets deceived by Hugo’s feminine hair bun, as well as a bisexual woman called Bianca with her tote bag.

After all of these failed scenarios, her bow gets tugged and snatched by Haru who flung her fishing line too far, hooking her into this new potential love."

Environment and Art Style

The environment for our short film is based after a countryside canal, sheltered by tree canopies and not affected by man made structures. I wanted the walkway to be a worn, dirt path which would be surrounded by long grass and wildflowers.

Our lighting would start during the day and show both god rays and scattered lighting through the leaves, progressing throughout the film to finish at sunset.

For our characters, I wanted their designs to be quite soft to fit the calm atmosphere of this short film. Minimal details and rounded features for a stylized look that would invite the viewer to watch but not be distracted and miss out on the other aspects like the environment.

Storyboard and Animatic

Our storyboard helped show our process of understanding the camera angles, character positions and emotions and later was made into an animation to start planning the timings and sound effects. 

Making an animatic also allowed us to start combining music from multiple sources to create a reference point we could send to our composer to help them understand the overall mood we wanted for our short film.

Character Design

Our character designs followed the idea of a simple art style, with basic facial features and clothing. We gave each characters names which helped us throughout the project and their colours are based of specific flags for the sexualities we chose for them to identify as.

Character Textures

 We added texture to their clothing so it wouldn’t look flat, and colour to their faces to breathe life into our characters. At first we didn’t have a style for the eyes, but we tested out pupil designs and found they improved the characters a lot.

Rigging

Each character, as well as a few assets, were modelled and rigged from scratch for this project. 

Modelled Assets

Shown on screen are all the assets we designed, modelled and textured ourselves for animation props and to help create the environment and atmosphere of our film.

Environment

The environment was constructed in Unreal Engine after compiling assets such as trees, grass and foliage, made in Speedtree and Maya.

Animation and References

This is a compilation of shot breakdowns from a handful of shots in the film, showing the progression between previs, reference footage, animation and final render.

Having real life references based on our animatic was incredibly helpful when planning camera angles and movement. Additionally, it was essential to have these references to help the animators block out the beginning of their shots.

Colour Script and Contact Sheet

Our colour script allowed us to envision our colours from starting brighter in the day, progressing to a warmer and darker nature for sunset.

The contact sheet helped us visualise our lighting ensuring that it was consistent throughout the whole film. This sheet was also very helpful for our technical director as she was able to spot any lighting problems that occurred while rendering and fix them as soon as possible to ensure a quicker workflow.

Final Film

Our final 3D Animation short film took over 4 months to create. I am more than happy to finally be able to share all of the teams hard work and present the short film we are all proud to have been a part of!