Final Outcome

Quick Stalk | Short Film

Story about two men, one a religious devotee and the other a televangelist. Stephen, who devoted to his religion to cope with illness, gets himself into a parasocial relationship with his pastor, Ross. 

The story continues with stalking and the depressing feelings of repressed and desperate attempts of love, as it starts flooding in and changing Stephen's perception of why he's actually going church...

Music by https://youtu.be/taAxpw03dgM?si=zH3A_HYNfrlkRiUS

Sound effects from KineMaster

Edited in KineMaster and VideoStar

Animated in Procreate and Toonsquid

Short film by Nad :) 

My project, Quick Stalk, has been such an adventurous ride. I have managed to do everything I wanted to do and beyond it as well. My goals and objectives was to create just a storyboard but I managed by pushing myself more and more each week to create a piece of work that has now satisfied my needs and even others!

The finished product took a lot of work to finish, but I'm glad I put in that work. I think it’s a good piece and with the time I had for this project I managed to make a one minute animation. I also took things that I learnt, specifically perspective, implemented into the scenes too to make everything have a perspective view. I think I reflected a lot of my experiments and research into the animation and it makes me glad that all of that hard work has been put into the final product properly.

The best part of my animation were the fully animated scenes of Stephen, when he looks down and fiddles with his necklace/pendant. This is because it had a lot of fluidity in the animation, it made me use my old skills in animation and it made me challenge myself to animate frame by frame, all coloured again. 

These scenes not only challenged my own skill but the outcomes of those scenes I really enjoyed, drawing all of the expressions for him was super fun and the fact they did come out really smooth made me enjoy these scenes. I liked changing his poses from looking up to the side to down as well, just expanding my skill with perspective there and drawing different views of the human face, it was a big learning experience.

Though there’s a lot of room for improvement. After I finished this, I even had some doubts about certain things that I would’ve changed if I had the time. First thing I’d do is change the art style. I made the animation in a quick and easy art style which focused on just ink lines with solid flat colours, but if I were to change it I would go with a much more suited art style that would show Stephen’s overall feelings more like how I expressed his burst of emotions near the end of the animation. Some things that I would’ve worked on were basic things like more voice and dialogue, making the story longer so it’s easier to understand the actual animation. 

I feel like a lot of this does matter to improve the actual animation, having a more artistic style when it comes to animation can make the audience more interested and it’s just better to have an artistic way of expressing. You can see this in many movies like Puss and Boots (23) and Spider-verse as their animations are like paint strokes which give a very nice appearance to the animation.  And other features like dialogue would help with storytelling and give more context rather than just the description of it on YouTube. 

During the making of this final project, I knew I had a lot of things that I struggled with, this was just mostly planning and catching up with all that planning. Especially being motivated to even finish work at all. This affects my work ethic a lot as I have trouble with focusing and locking in with a project. But I think I have changed that into a strength, as after doing all of that animation I now feel extremely motivated to make a great piece of work. Using apps like Trello or Google Docs to make small planning boards or checklists helped me finish this project. I managed to finish it faster than I think I would if I didn’t have planning apps. 

I still personally have a lot of room for improvement, taking the opportunity to get more feedback from others, when I made characters I forgot to get feedback for the designs and I feel like that could’ve helped me have stronger character designs. 

Throughout the project though, I have learned a lot. I have learned the basics of creating a short film and storyboard. These being things I wasn't sure about before as I’ve only done simple animations in my own time. 

I found the easiest thing in my project was the presentation and visual effects, this is because they were the quickest parts I did. Uploading an animation and writing a short brief was super easy and making it public for others to watch when they want, was not difficult.

The visual effects were easy as I am experienced with editing in the program I chose, making it a quick process that I’ve done millions of times.

The only thing I found difficult was the audio most of the time. I couldn’t find a really good non-copyright song to use and it was making me annoyed how many songs were either too dramatic or just ambience. I found it way too difficult to even do my own song in the amount of time as well, I’d have to learn a lot of things which I probably would scrap at the end of the day. 

My project compared to the many animations I analysed before, is a very big comparison in my opinion. I feel like mine was very rushed compared to the very fluid and refined animations of others. I don’t think I did bad for one week but the other animators did think more about colours and what the film would have with a limited colour palette which helps make the film look more professional as mine didn’t have a set out palette I could’ve used. I think mine also lacked a lot of context which was okay for the circumstance. 

I would not choose to do a short film again, I would try to refrain from a film and perhaps a super short animation or a gif or illustrated piece that’s animated. This is because the animation took so much of my time, mentally and a lot of my fmp’s calendar time. I would also ask for more feedback when it came to multiple things. 

Other people who have given me feedback on my final piece all gave me the same doubts that I had but also complimented my work. I knew adding the part that was inspired by spider-verse as so many people really enjoyed that part. I also knew that I struggled with the fluency of the film and things like dialogue, those all help create a much smoother animation that is more pleasing to watch and enjoy. My animation was very impressive for some of the people giving feedback and that was flattering for the amount of work I put into it but the feedback that would help me in the future if I ever choose to do more animation was greatly appreciated as it was constructive.

In conclusion, I think I have done great throughout the whole project and the final outcome was better than I even expected. The whole work I put into this has challenged me and made me learn new things I may have struggled with in the past. This has also just helped me with motivation as well and I’m just super happy with the finished product.