2D Character Animator
Worked to Death is a 2 minute short film that I pitched and directed in my second year of university, alongside the producer, Sara Hatton. The film is a dark comedy, following the path of an unfortunate intern assigned to fill in when the Grim Reaper takes his holiday leave.
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When the film was first conceptualised we intended to make it in Maya using 3D animation, but when our team was assigned we quickly moved to a more mixed-media approach, placing 2D animated characters into 3D toon-shaded backgrounds. Although this decision felt like a defeat at the time, it was also the most sensible choice to make given the resources we had to hand. Had we continued in 3D I believe we would have a much less cohesive outcome, and we would have sacrificed the key skills of multiple crew members, as only one of our team was a true 3D specialist.
Our team makeup was not ideal for the project, as we had only four members and were lacking an obvious answer for lot of important roles, including clean-up and background artists.
The script and story for Worked to Death went through almost continuous changes throughout production. From early on I wanted to emphasise the comedy aspects of the concept, including both situation and physical gags within the script.
Through workshopping with other team members, however, the script took a more morbid turn at points, due to conflicts in the directions we wished to develop the idea.
Because of this I feel the final script was neither light enough to be a true comedy, nor dark enough to feel suspenseful and morose, leaving it feeling a little emotionally bland. In future projects I would like to have a particular crew member assigned to script and story, with a clear focus of the final feeling we want to create in the film.
I would ideally have liked a lot more focus and research to go into the art direction of this film. Although I do not mind the final look of the film, I do not feel it is particularly visually appealing.
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Art direction is a job I ended up taking over after the original art director would not research or deviate from their own personal style. As none of our crew had a particular strength in art direction and visual development it ended up falling by the wayside for a while, with a lot of unmatching and half-finished designs. From this, my producer Sara and I tried our best to produce cohesive character designs and a visually interesting style of clean-up.
The use of a limited colour palette is perhaps what pulled the film together finally. Scenes in the city featured muted, musty browns and oranges, while the Grim Reaper's beach holiday had more saturation and contrast.
The backgrounds in Worked to Death were 3D modelled by members of the visual effects pathway on our university course. This was a result of a number of factors, starting with the film's original 3D concept, as well as a lack of background artists and a desire to save time for an already over-stretched team.
Convincing Maya to render these environments into a 2D linework was a surprisingly difficult task, as we discovered that the toonshaders are notoriously buggy. Despite this, we experimented with a few different options in the render tools, including the use of harsh shadows to give a more edgy tone to the film.
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In the end we decided on rendering simple black lines from Maya and filling them in with a limited colour palette, making use of cell shading styles to give depth to the images.
The character designs for the film were a fairly collaborative process, up to a point. The small team meant that each member could easily have their voice heard, but much like the script work, this ended up in more confusion than anything else at points. I took matters into my own hands, taking the concepts produced by each team member and focusing them into a set of turnarounds in a consistent style.
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The character style for Worked to Death is more cartoony than my usual remit, with exaggeratedly large eyes and high contrast colours. I feel this suits the style of the final film as the characters stand out from their environments but don't look out of place.
My favourite character to design was the Grim Reaper, as I wanted to make sure he had a very distinct and expressive look. Working out Grim's facial movements was one of my favourite parts of this project, as I had to figure out how to make a skeleton emote and lip sync.
I ended up heading the sound recording for Worked to Death after the original head of sound failed to make any headway on the job, and fully edited the audio into our film. This was both the first time I had used the Dubbing Theatre since an induction in first year and the second time I had edited audio using Protools and the Post Production Suites. For this reason, this project provided a steep learning curve – but once I had got the hang of things I quite enjoyed the process.
Getting back to grips with Protools after over a year since I last (and first) used it proved a little tricky – ideally I would prefer to have worked together with someone more knowledgeable in sound in order to smooth out the process, but there was no-one available so I learnt mostly through trial and error. With this new experience I feel a lot better equipped to deal with sound than I did before working on Worked to Death, and I would be fairly open to working on sound again if needed.
During animation production for Worked To Death, I put an emphasis on producing quality over quantity. I worked on some of the more complex and detailed shots in the film, including a camera pan around a walking character, and scenes featuring four interacting characters.
Worked to Death was the turning point in my university career that lead me to specialise in 2D animation, with an emphasis on complex movements and character acting. With this specialism I also took on the role of Animation Director for the film, providing feedback to my fellow crew members on their shots. Although this was mainly done in person I was also able to help when not working in the studios via the group chat, commenting on videos sent by my teammates. Through this feedback I believe we were able to improve several shots in the film.
Worked to Death is unfortunately currently unfinished and out of production. It is a project that I would very much love to return to in the future when I have time.