Bard's Duelet

My thesis film at its core comes from a place of love and celebration towards my original characters. With their 10th anniversary coinciding with the year of my graduation, the main goal I had for my film was to just have fun with the concept. I wanted the story to be an opportunity to have all members of the main group speak at least once, and to have a less serious side-story take place within their typically more serious world. Artistically, I also sought to take advantage of the extra time (about a year) that thesis permitted and experiment with how far I could push myself, thus taking my already traditional style and adding in hand drawn shadows and a sketchy overlay via reusing the rough animation to bring the characters right out of a sketchbook in a sense. 

Concept Art and Development

‘Bard’s Duelet’ is a story about the twins Kira and Keaton, whom in their attempts to push their own musical scores to the forefront, neglect listening to the other as a musical duel devolves into an argument. It’s a story about listening to one another, and realizing that playing together may perhaps be better than shining on stage alone. The images above are some of the initial style-frames exploring that plot, where I had yet to settle on committing to the custom shadows out of still getting a feel for my timeline. Below is my background process which was started early in the filmmaking process, where I utilized a 3D model I crafted to assist in consistency and production speed. The tavern was meant to be a somewhat small, but cozy place, and I wanted each background to resemble a painting.

For backgrounds as well, I also created a flat version of just the walls, which allowed me to copy, paste, and transform the different sections overtop the 3D screenshots. Though I would have to correct the sketch occasionally, this was also used to speed of the process. Typically I prefer drawing backgrounds without 3D assistance, however, for films where I prefer completing that part myself they have proven invaluable to saving time, and are vital to allowing me to put that time into other areas.

Character Designs

For the characters I took this as a chance to finally assemble model sheets for a large portion of the cast-from main characters to some of the side characters. I crafted sheets based on necessity-background characters only required front and back as they were not moving as much, whilst main characters who spoke or moved around received more thorough model sheets. The twins received expression sheets as well, and as many of these characters are years old, it was more of me polishing their designs rather than creating them from scratch. 

Animation

For animation I worked in my typical manner, animatic, rough animation, inks (where I preemptively colored eyes and mouths as to make my colorists’ jobs easier), color, then first composite. I also, as previously mentioned, reused my rough animation overtop the final lines as a means of adding texture to the shots akin to Disney's '101 Dalmatians' or the 'Rescuers'. As each shot was brought into After Effects individually, I decided to leave my final film grain effects and color corrections out until everything was already strung together, thus allowing me to focus on lighting, shadow, and placement in the initial composites. 

Backgrounds

Final Word

Bard’s Duelet to this date has been one of the most intensive projects I’ve worked on, yet despite that it has also been one of the most fulfilling. My voice acting cast and assistants were absolute joys to work with, and being able to dedicate a full year to just my characters was a wonderful experience. Thank you for taking the time to view ‘Bard’s Duelet’, and I hope that you’ve enjoyed a glimpse behind the scenes at the process.