Starting Over

Starting Over

Starting Over is a 2D animated short film that follows Mochi the cat as he regains his confidence outdoors, after an unfortunate accident, with the help of his owner. This story was inspired by the recovery process of my actual cat under the same name. 

Character Concepts

First initial designs for the characters, Mochi and his owner.

Mochi Character Design and Development

Sketches of Mochi. I have previously never had experience with drawing cats and their anatomy so I created some sketches from my cat as well as attempted to try and find a way to stylise him in a more semi-realistic way.

Mochi's design is based on my actual cat, who is a tabby. I experimented with his patterns and how I go about simplifying them. Eventually, I decided on the patterns seen in his expression sheet and his turnarounds. During production, however, I simplified him further to the patterns you see on him in the film.

Owner Character Design and Development

Mochi's owner is loosely based around my sister, who was one of Mochi's main carers during his real-life recovery process. Her design stayed relatively the same during production however, I simplified her skirt into leggings, keeping the colour scheme the same.

A scrub through the process

Here are a few sliders that guide you through the basic production of a couple of scenes. Starting with the animatic stage, going into lining followed by colour and then finally, the fully rendered and comped scene.

Backgrounds and their inspiration

As I do not have much experience with background work, it was an initial struggle to decide which style to do them in that would contrast with the style of the animation. At first, I used the backgrounds of Steven Universe as my main inspiration. But in the end, looked more into the way the concept arts for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse did theirs. Above is the first initial style concept I created.

The backgrounds and their textures were toned down for the final film, due to the potential look of it being too cluttered.

Process of background art

I followed the same process for every single background within the film. The initial sketch, lining, gray-scaling then gradient mapping. An example is shown below:

Thank you for viewing my film and Mochi and I really appreciate you viewing our page!