2018-19 Student film, co-directed with Carly Hillis-Tedder.
To see the film in its entirety, check it out on Film Freeway! Simply contact me for the password, or any further information.
I hopped onto Carly’s film concept at the stage where we were pitching our timed storyboards. Her skill sets were geared towards concept creation, so I opted to act as lead animator and co-director, and together we found a new look for her story about a young bat boy just trying to help his friend get home.
With a primary team size of three–Carly, me, and my producer fiancée–we had our work cut out for us when it came to creating enough content to fit the vision she had in mind. We went through several ideas, creating puppets, teaching ourselves to edit, relying on our fellow students for their expertise when it came to style, coloring, and cleaning, and just generally spending hours waiting out the Atlanta traffic by hand animating in the homework labs.
As the story focused on Lori’s emotional state, I tried to showcase some character acting skills in my animation for him. He grew ganglier over time, and it made it a fun challenge to place him in varying perspectives and keeping his ears twitchy without losing their sense of weight.
Thanks to all the peers and professors that helped make this film happen!
Over time we decided to focus on purple for the forest and green for the relative safety of the fireflies, so we took the early backgrounds and reduced the amount of colors.