BꓵLLET - Animated Short

Making Of

BꓵLLET is my first animated short, made as a study case for a 2D course. I had a great time developing this piece, which became part of 3 international film festivals: First-Time Filmmaker Sessions at @PinewoodStudios, Short Shot Fest, and TOFUZI International Animated Film Festival.

THE BEGINNING

First things first, I focused on character design. I usually have a vague idea in mind and start sketching. Here is Karen’s first concept I made using my mobile phone.

CHARACTER
DESIGN

After the sketch, it was time to search for references to find a clear direction of the style I wanted. I finalized the character design in Procreate on iPad.

MODEL SHEET

I was pretty economical with that: a front and ¾ view.

VECTORIZING AND RIGGING

Straight in Moho Pro, I transform the bitmap design into vectors. I used a Cintiq 13hd. Moho is an intuitive software for rigging, so it was easy to prepare the parts for proper animation without using codes.

ANIMATION

Using real-life footage, I animated the dancing parts. It took me a while a time to find a satisfactory resolution to that part.

Menina8_BONE CONSTRAINS.moho - Moho 2022-03-16 10-11-07.gif

BACKGROUND

I digitally painted the background in Procreate, separating each piece into different layers so I could produce some parallax effect.

COMPOSITION

In Adobe After Effects, I made the composition, camera movement, VFX, and additional animations.

SOUND DESIGN

At last, this was a fun but time-consuming part: the sound. I displaced more than 100 different sound effects in 20 tracks to finalize this 2-minute short film. I download some of them from stock sites and recorded others with a Zoom H6n.