Short Film
My capstone project to my MFA in Illustration was a trailer to the short story, “Rib Caged” which is a story about hero Skülly as he steps into an adventure of puzzle, confusion, self-doubt, and eventual resolution through a metaphorical meditation when he learns he can flip his head upside-down to see things from a fresh perspective and escape a magic temple.
Animation
MFA capstone project - a trailer to a full short film.
CLIENT
Personal
ANIMATION
Latham Arnott
Direction & Design
Kirk Wallace
Writing
Adam Danielson
Jeremy Lwamugira
Jeff Guerra
Kevin Wallace
Latham Arnott
Animation
Latham Arnott
Music & Sound
Jeff Guerra
Jeremy Lwamugira
Skullboy Trademark
Richie A Stewart
Credits
When I started the project, I knew I wanted to capture mood and tone without much vocal narrative in the story.
I didn’t want a narrator explaining what was happening, but instead wanted to take a silent film approach and rely on visuals to tell my story.
I asked my friends Jeremy Lwamugira, Jeff Guerra, Adam Danielson, and Latham Arnott to help me out with the writing of things.
We met once a week to write and rewrite what ended up being our final script and storyboard.
Having a team of people working on this allowed one another to push each other. Many times after finishing a version, Adam would recommend starting over from scratch, with more constraints, forcing us to the most streamlined and interesting story possible.
The main character, Skülly, is based on the Skull Boy trademark created by Richie Stewart for my freelance studio, BoneHaüs created in 2014. I took the mark from the logo version and over the last few years slowly expanded on the design to create something of a muse for me to work on as a personal development project.
Skülly being made of bones and in a whimsical imaginative fashion, was great for animation because he can squash and stretch to a point of breaking, which plays perfectly into his personality.
In this story, his bones breaking, and general clumsiness is what ends up being the apex of the story about a lack of confidence, and later an accepting of self.
ILLUSTRATOR & PHOTOSHOP PROCESS
Sketches were done by both myself and Latham Arnott, based on the storyboard rough thumbnails. A lot of changes took place between the sketch and the final frame during the process of vectoring in Adobe Illustrator.
A sketch serves as a rough reference but when I’m working in Illustrator I am able to really play and move things around and resize them how I like.
Once the sketches were dialed in, I’d bring them into Illustrator and trace them with the pen tool and use Astute Graphics plugins to assist productivity.
Assuming my sketch is nailed down pretty well, I can get meditative with this part of the process, embellishing on certain details, reposing characters, and letting loose a bit.
Provided the scene is the first of it’s kind (snowy, jungle, etc) I’ll come up with a rough and simple color palette, usually 4-5 colors to start and begin dropping that in and slowly refine until it feels cohesive.
Lastly some texture, color correction, and lighting in Photoshop gives it the warm quality desired. Because I have hundreds of brushes, favoriting the certain 10 or so was extremely helpful to keep the consistency throughout each scene.
Below are a couple of process tear-downs from sketch to final.
LIVE STREAM VIDEO OF PROCESS
I had the privilege to stream my full process of the poster on Adobe Live in San Francisco alongside a cohost Kathleen Martin where we chatted and answered questions from guests.
It’s pretty fun and maybe worth putting on in the background. The first video is a little nervy but the second and third get more confident and informative I hope. There are 3 days total for 6 hours of streaming, feel free to skip around.
