PORTFOLIO

Capstone WIP

Scene 4:

Scene 4 was one of the first scenes animated within this project due to the simple animation used with the floating rocks. How this was done, was through having three separate layers of drawn debris, all 'animated' at different speeds using the Record tool in ProCreate Dreams, which the animation of this project was created in, with the post-production compositing made within Microsoft Clipchamp as it was simpler to use, and a program I was able to get running properly on my laptop.

As for the animated video above, that was the first WIP of the piece, a lot of the core animation unfinished due to not having enough time to fully finish it from roughs to completed compositing within 12 weeks, though it is still a piece I was proud of with how complex some sections were to do such as backgrounds or Scene 5 with the fully rendered close up of Aldrin the Bartender that was meant to be 'talking' to the viewers.

This is the Main Character shown within this project, Aldrin Lorwein, was originally created for a Dungeons and Dragons game I was going to run, but his personality and design helped inspire the idea for the project along with ARGs that I had been really into like Ranboo's Generation Loss and Alex Hirsch's Book of Bill. Aldrin's story and Bar is the first of eight (8) within an ARG series I am hoping to create, with Aldrin's part opening the world to the entire series, giving more questions than answers before moving further.

His outfit design was something that mostly took design choices from characters in media as well as outfits I had saved within my Pinterest Board under 'Outfit Creation Inspo' for something that was regal yet [mostly] simple. There were definitely pieces of this design made a year prior to the start of this project that I tossed aside like the earrings, 'white' freckles, pants chain, and small stones that went on the ends of the tailcoat. The design also translated differently from 2023 to 2024 with a shift in my normal art style and my workflow.

These are some background character designs, with the Snake-like creature with eyes only being present in the thumbnail storyboards and not the final animation, though it is a character I wish to use and show in a later part of the Story. The Satyr, however, has been present since the first rendition of the Bar scene created for a separate task with minimal changes to the design being made from the original to the final concept design. In the early Storyboards for this project, there was a Gorgon background character present as well, but I completely removed them when it came to creating the rough animation for this project though they might return in one of the other seven (7) parts of this whole story.

My main inspirations for the snake creature came from Honkai Star Rail with the Memory Zone Death Meme boss as well as Ouroboros the serpent/dragon that eats its own tail, and the idea of a 'World Eater', which led to its final design though the Memory Zone Meme held the main inspiration for its overall design.

The Satyr, however, came from a place of creating a Dungeons and Dragons character I had been playing within a campaign called Zeke, as well as a homage to one of the first characters I had animated at the beginning of my degree that I never gave a name to.

The backgrounds were something I spent the longest on, going from looking at floor plans, perspective views, and lighting compositions for different ideas for the space. In total, there were around 15 different sketched out concepts created for this one space looking damage-free and 'bright' until I landed on a design thought up from a second sketched out floor plan (middle canvas, bottom row) that made for an easier to design and animate scenery that also influenced a fully rendered with simple - and non existent source of - lighting to show how a character like Aldrin would interact with the space before I had completely settled on the ARG and 'normal vs desolate/broken' counterparts of a singular space.

The final design of the bar took inspiration from this rendered piece here that was made during the time of sketching and concepting different designs for the Bar the story was set in. There were definitely changes made between this illustration and the final concept of the space, but the simplicity of the space here is what made a more detail heavy design turn to be much more simple. This was also a favourite piece of mine to do not because of the background, but because I liked how Aldrin looked with this space and how his more detail oriented design stood out. And also because it was the only time I drew hands and not know how I drew hands, especially ones that were far better than what I was used to doing prior to starting the roughs of this project.

These were the original storyboard thumbnails created for this project and the plans drawn out. The main concept and themes explored stayed, though elements and designs did chance along the way like the removal of the moving camera at the very beginning of the short film, and breaking up the bartending scene on the last two lines of the first page. Out of all of these panels, I enjoyed animating the 'final' part of the film which was the 'No Signal Found' page and the walk cycle in the "Credits;' scene.

The quality of the sketches for each panel changed depending on how much each part was completely roughed out and refined with some panels looking more detailed than others.