The Beginning of My Journey
This animated short film started from a premise wiki I did in the Animated Narratives class during my time at MAGI (Master of Animation, Games and Interactivity), RMIT. The premise wiki is ‘what if islands could move around freely’. I developed a super long ass love story from that idea alone during holiday, and scrapped most of it away after my first class in studio 2. As a newbie in the whole animated short film directing industry, I never really thought about the intention behind my work. And when my lecturers (great people, Matt and Jadd, love you two!) asked me about my inquiry, I was totally confused and blind-sighted. I had no idea what I had to do and I decided to watch a bunch of animated short film for inspiration. Good news for the panicking me was that I was successfully inspired after binge watching animated short films. I found myself being attracted to films that consisted of narration, metaphors and visual morphing. That’s how I started my journey for my first ever animated short film ‘Of Coconuts and Flowers’ (2020).
'Of Coconuts and Flowers' (2020) Poster.
The Story, the Narration, and the Animatic
I like the idea of sending out messages to the audience through animation, and slowly changing the world if possible. That’s why I decided to branch out the whole animation alone from the idea of a toxic relationship from my original love story (the one that’s scrapped out!). However, not wanting the topic to be too triggering, I decided to hide everything under analogies and anthropomorphism.
Metaphors in narration and visuals are a bit hard for me to work on because I had no previous experience with the topic. However, I think we all have to start somewhere. Hence, I decided to just work on it. Constant iteration is how I tackled the subject. And with the help of my friends, I managed to write out a narration that works. For the visuals in the animatic though, I had to send it to multiple friends and lecturers in the MAGI cohort to get the feedback I needed. My film would only be successful if it is understood by the audience. That’s why feedback is an important part of my workflow too.
To lighten the topic though, I decided to end the story on a positive note, leaving a more ambiguous ending for the audience to imagine. I hope that my audience would be able to understand that toxic relationship do exist and there is no such thing as a quick recovery. However, there is always hope where you decide to step out of the first step.
Character Design Sketches.
Production Rambling
The production side of things consists of tons of tutorials and tons of working hours. Tweaking stuff here and there took away all my time. However, I quite enjoyed my time working alone. I was in lockdown due to COVID and I really had nothing else to do besides producing. I now know that it’s not really healthy to keep on producing when I should have balanced my life out a bit. But I really think that the fact that I had to produce my film gave me something to focus on and kept on motivating me.
By the way, I love the style of the film, it’s not the sole reason I went for NPR (non-photorealistic rendering) for the animated short film. Due to the fact that I have no render farm in hand and cannot go to uni studio to render at that time, I had to consider the least time-consuming option to optimise the amount of time I could really work on the production of the project. In the end, I decided on using Blender to create the project and used its Viewport Rendering to render my whole film. Love the final filmic look though! It’s an unexpected surprise!
Sound design
I was afraid of contacting a sound designer before this film was made as I had no experience with a professional sound designer. It felt like I might trust my baby to someone that’s not good enough and mess up my film. However, my fellow MAGI lecturer, Matt, introduced Fynn Michlin to me. He just graduated from RMIT not long ago as well and has been working on sound design for a few projects. I really like his work and decided to contact him. He is a really cool and chill sound designer. Knowing that I had no previous experience of contacting a sound designer, he sent me the template of a sound brief, which I then took reference to and made my own. Then, we decided to work together. As simple as that.
I really like how he worked on my project and that experience alone gave me confidence to reach out to others and improved my ability to trust other professionals in doing their job.
Final thoughts
Producing an animated short film is not easy at all. There are so many ties into one production. Pre-production, production, and post-production. And it’s still not the end of the film. You don’t just post it on social media and be done with it. As a director, I would like my film to be seen by people for the message to be sent through to people. Hence, I have to try to submit my film to festivals in hope to at least get a screening opportunity. It’s difficult. This is my first film and I’ve never done it before. But I would like to try my best and hope that one day, it will change people’s life.
Even though producing an animated short film is tiring, I still love every bit of it. I don’t regret the amount of time and effort I put into the film. And I hope that whoever is reading this will at least feel warm-hearted when watching it.
Thanks for reading my loooooong story. See ya in the next one!
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