Making of “Fears”

Fears is a 2-minute VFS graduation film, made in 15 weeks. I had a general concept in mind before we started the production officially, but I didn’t develop the story itself until we were told, ‘okay, go!’

First was research, brainstorming and noting down ideas about fears in general – what they can do and how people can interact with them.

More presentable ideas for the production meeting:

Then a story of a fearless man coming to a big city began to emerge (in the first version he even died because of his carelessness). Thumbnails and a general story structure:

At the same time I started doing animation tests and exploring a possible look of the film.

Then was the time for a proper storyboard with full-sized panels. It’s a good idea to draw a storyboard straight in flash. Thus you will have the correct sizes, you can start setting up your timing, adding camera movements, layering and naming objects properly. So you will get 2-in-1 stage - storyboard and layout at the same time.

Character design. On the first pass I quickly rough out general shapes and colors with a standard square brush.

Then I go to the details, still trying to keep the certain level of roughness.

Some expressions.

My favorite part - color. To me, the colors are very important for visual appeal, so I spent a lot of time on colorblocking and colorcorrection.

Until it became look good on all monitors, projectors and other devices.

The most intriguing part - animation! Though I was studying in a classical animation program, I never wanted to animate my film on paper. So I had to build my own digital production pipeline based on a common sense (yes, it worked).

All animation was done in flash. Animatic is a first pass:

Second step is rough animation (with added camera move):

Then goes clean animation, which in my case is also a colored one. The jittering was fixed by putting action on ones.

The final step is to add painted and textured elements on top. Here a background is painted in photoshop, as well as a fear creature and a tattoo on a macho man. To do that, I export a png sequence of clean elements that need to be painted into photoshop (1 frame = 1 layer), paint them there, and re-export a new png sequence back into flash.

It’s quite a meticulous process, as all files have to be named properly and saved in a particular place. In the film, there are 1,163 separate elements painted in photoshop.

Between rough and clean animation, all backgrounds were painted, I tried to keep them abstract-ish. In the shots with animated camera all bg’s were painted frame-by-frame.