PROJECTS | Mysite 1

Ye olde day at the Beach

‘Ye olde day at the Beach’ was my capstone film I made as a senior at Pratt institute; the only parameters being that it had to be 4 minutes or under

In development I knew I wanted to do something funny and nonsensical, and at the same time I found myself forming a really deep interest in European medieval art. I think the visual motifs and emphasis on detail is what really drew me to it, and I knew that I wanted to make something that was just as perceivably rich and busy as the art that I had been seeing in that time whether that was in person from museums or just looking up pieces from the internet. I also personally thought it would be easier to build off of a specific visual theme for me to reference, it was easy to find inspiration in the medieval context but I felt like I needed something else to flesh out the film a little bit more to make it more dimensional.

I also personally thought it would be easier to build off of a specific visual theme for me to reference, it was easy to find inspiration in the medieval context but I felt like I needed something else to flesh out the film a little bit more to make it more dimensional.

I decided to marry this new interest of medieval art with an old one I’ve had for as long as I can remember: the ocean, specifically tidepools. This concept was just me meshing two things that I really personally enjoyed together, but when I thought about it some more I realised that they are actually not all that different in why I like them. I find both ‘things’ (tidepools and medieval art) to be extremely similar in optics: Medieval art is characterized as being extremely decorative and tidepools conceptually similar due to the amount and variety of creatures that live in them; that’s when I found the throughline in connecting the two when it came to my visual concepts.

At this point I had come up with a knight character to fit the medieval part of my theme and built upon the idea of him exploring tidepools; something that is assumed to be an unknown to him due to the supposed old-timey concept of being somewhat tied closely to where you resided.

I bet a couple of people would have lost their mind if they saw the ocean for the first time in their life back then; I decided to capitalize on the fear and stupidity of knowing nothing about where you happen to find yourself at whatever given time. This made another throughline idea of this knight specifically seeking out sea ‘monsters’ to kill, referencing medieval bestiaries, books that described various animals that are comically not-so-accurate due to the lack of knowledge and creative liberties that manuscript artists had at the time.

I wanted to keep this knight in the real world where he explores a normal beach that has no monsters and real-life creatures to show fantastical expectations not meeting with what is actually being out in front of you. Everything will be as normal and mundane as you see it, until it isn't: Because I then added a mermaid who falls in love with this knight while he becomes enamored with exploring tidepools, and he’s too distracted by the real-life creatures to even notice the beautiful mermaid (who is also a monster, the whole reason why he even wanted to go to the ocean) who it trying to get his attention.

This narrative was good enough for me to continue on, and at that point it was boards, editing, a color script, more editing, and rough animation that were next.

I strictly used the toon boom suite for animating, storyboard pro for boards and animatic and harmony for animating. Procreate was used for the background work and was compiled in the adobe suite for final export and sound.

One of the largest challenges for me personally was the knight's character design; a full suit of armor can be really time consuming to draw over and over when animating, especially when it came to all the different angles I had boarded. Drawing that armor from the back was deadly.

I tend to animate my roughs relatively loosely with little to no detail so I can focus on large things like movement and form and then I will run it back in adding details in tie downs, but that wasn’t an option due to time constraints so i found myself adding all the detail of the character from basically scratch which added countless more hours of time on my work, but less than if I were to do one or two more passes in animating.

The time constraint struggles also refers to the actual run time I also had a lot of time constraints in the 4 minute limit; cutting and adding time in every shot made me feel like I couldn’t trust myself and my own intuition when it came to effective storytelling and I found myself nervous about the possible lack of knowledge I was giving to the audience and wondering if people would understand the concept and humor of the piece itself.

The time consuming part of it wouldn't be as much of an issue as it was if I wasn't doing this for school. I spent a total of 3 semesters, my second junior year semester for development and boarding, and my 2 senior semesters for the production and post respectively. I guess it would also be important to note that this was all done by myself, with the help of coloring with a couple of people and a really talented composer for my audio. It truly wouldn’t have been what it was without those people.