ANIM2004

Pitching Ideas - "It started to rain"

For my animated short I have decided to focus on an animation idea I've been slowly developing in the back of my head during most of the summer.

The main idea is that it opens with someone getting dressed - a normal person. However, after the title card, you notice they aren't in fact a regular person, but they are tiny in size! They have to face countless challenges in the wild while it's raining, while getting from point A to point B.

I've had this idea in my head for a while now, as I developed it while hoping the university would eventually have a task like this :)

The Script

It started to rain.pdf

Concept Art & Development

Environmental Inspiration

extremely rough sketches done in MS Paint of the environments - a box, as well as some leaves and grass.

Garden concept art

Characters

Character A, the main character of the short film.

Audio test - Character A

Character B, supporting character.

Audio test - Character B (Voice provided by my roommate Noel)

Beat Boards

Storyboards

These are the storyboards for the story - at least the original boards. as we currently know them!

Some cutting may occur during the creation of the animatic itself, as I may have realized I might slightly exceed the time limit we've been given.

Some thoughts I've had for backgrounds for this project

Photo backgrounds, 2d animation on top
hand painted on paper
hand painted digitally
painted digitally with textures taken from free stock photos
textures taken by myself

During pre-production, I also finally settled on the names for the characters - Willow, the main character and Wisp, their friend.

Since the world they live in, while a normal garden for us is like a whole forest to them, it made sense for me. Other names I've considered were Petal, Branch, Twig and Olive.

Treatment

It Started to Rain

Treatment, Nov 11th 2020

Kacper Kalicinska

Logline

Willow (Character A) has to visit a friend while it’s raining outside, but keeps running into problems until they finally reach point B, which is their friend Wisp’s house.

Characters

Willow - A tiny person who is an appreciator of the outside world. They’re smart and cunning, and quite quick on their feet. Their hair is teal in colour.

Wisp - The friend Willow is trying to get to. Calm and kind with red hair and pale skin. Also a fellow tiny person.

Cat - The cat that keeps chasing Willow. It has black fur and yellow eyes.

Synopsis

Willow is getting ready to leave the house by dressing up, as we see them put on a scarf while they’re turned away from us. There is a faint sound of the rain pitter-pattering onto the roof. Then we’re shown a title card, white text on a dark background.

Thereafter, Willow is seen to leave their house. The house is a cardboard box, and lies in an overgrown garden. It’s still raining, but Willow smiles to themselves as they look around the lush green garden.

Willow starts walking through the garden on a dirt path between the grass. They keep looking around, and don’t look in front of them as they keep walking. Suddenly they slip, and we see them fall face first into mud.

As Willow gets up, we can see that something big is behind them. The creature leans down, and we can see that it is a cat. Willow, who is scared, turns around to face the cat directly face-to-face. They get up and start running, while the cat chases after them.

The cat chases willow through the garden, with Willow taking sharp turns to try and throw the cat off. It doesn’t work, and the cat keeps chasing. After another turn, they hide behind a garden rock.

Willow then gets an idea - They start running again, and grab a leaf. They then rush over to yet another muddy hill, sledding downhill on the leaf. The cat was not prepared for this, as it didn’t look where it was going, and falls face first into the dirt.

Willow hurries away from the cat, seeing their friend’s cardboard box house. They rush over, entering the box.

Willow’s friend, Wisp, is standing in the box. They look amused over at Willow, asking them “What took you so long?”

Willow, who has been soaked in the rain, takes off their scarf. They smile, looking at the scarf before looking at their friend. They then reply to Wisp by stating “It started to rain”.

The two then walk away off-screen, and credits roll.

The Animatic

The animatic was done entirely in Toon Boom Harmony, with the audio being edited in Audacity. The sound files for the rain were taken from Zapsplat, which is a website that provides free sound effects.

The actual animation will have proper sound effects, but since an animatic is an animated sketch, those features will arrive at a later date.

I had to cut some of the parts of the storyboards either down or cut them completely, such as scene 2 shot 3, where Willow steps directly onto mud with their shoe.

The voices provided were both by me and my roommate Noel, who agreed to be part of this project by voicing Wisp.

Similar Media

The Secret World of Arrietty

Studio Ghibli, 2010

It's to safe to say that the 2010 Ghibli movie The Secret World of Arrietty is the closest you'll find to the general atmosphere I'm headed for with this project. The world is filled with incredible background details, with tiny human artifacts scattered around as decorations and utensils for small people. This is much like how in my story, small people live in boxes!

The movie has amazing water physics - The individual raindrops hit the leaf gently, rustling it every time. While I decided against a leaf umbrella as it's quite an overused trope in these kinds of films, it's still incredible. It can even be seen in the gif below, as the tea pouring out of the pot is dense and acts like a simple droplet, as it's exactly what it is!

The lush green backgrounds of Ghibli movies and the warm homey feeling are the perfect inspiration for a story like mine, despite it being unintentional.

Epic

Blue Sky Studios, 2013

While it's not a movie I enjoy, Epic is still a movie about a small person in a big world. Though the main character is turned small, fundamentally she spends most of the movie tiny as can be, thus still following similar world rules as both Arrietty and It Started to Rain.

Being a CGI movie, there's already a lot more that differs. Unlike Arrietty, this world feels strange and unknown due to the fantasy in the movie not being based off of our everyday life.

It's more of an adventure movie, with two opposing sides going into battle with each other. This is not the vibe I'm going for, but it was still interesting to take a look at again. I find that the concept art, such as shown below, makes the movie seem way more fun than it actually was to sit through.

I'm afraid I hadn't done the background art examples this week due to feeling ill and focusing on other modules for the most part, but I'll get on it soon!

Sometimes due to the animation's fault, the backgrounds have to be layered, with some parts of it acting as foreground and other parts of it acting as background.

I came to the colour palettes conclusion after messing around in Photoshop with overlays, however I forgot to document this. There are more examples of backgrounds below, also stemming from the first scene.

This background is longer, as it will be part of a panning shot.

While this background is still, most of the details in this will come from the animation of rain falling down in a POV mode.

Keeping to a purple-green palette while trying to keep things simple is working out very well for this project, and I am quite pleased. Once I am done with every background, I will finally line my work, giving me enough wiggle room.

These are both examples of foreground and backgrounds in shots, clearly showing the foreground as a more distinct purple than the muted colours in the backgrounds.

They will be layered under and over the animation itself, much like the ones seen above with the box house.

Deadlines set for myself.

Backgrounds done by - February 14th

Animation and polished audio done by - March 14th

Inking and colouring - April, before finals deadline

Extremes

The problems with the backgrounds

it started to rain greenscreen take 2.mov

Due to unforseen circumstances, and no matter what I tried, my backgrounds would simply not import into my Toon Boom Harmony. I was left at a loss unsure what to do, until I decided to merge two programs together. Instead of trying to force the backgrounds into Toon Boom without them showing up at all, I decided to put a green screen behind the animation and add the backgrounds into Premiere Pro instead.

The greenscreened and coloured version can be seen to the side, before the video was exported to and polished in Premiere Pro.

Finishing up the Project

With the help of the green screen, I could put all the backgrounds as well as some sound effects into the video using Premiere Pro without any issues.

Thanks to this program, I also used effects suck as directional blur on the backgrounds while they were moving to give an immersion of the characters moving while running.

I had to cut some parts of the video to make sure the layering worked okay, and it all seems to have turned out great in the end! Despite all of the difficulties with exporting backgrounds, in the end I managed to succeed.

VID_20210705_154802.mp4

Here you can see some of the sound effects I recorded for the project.

Production Bible

ISTR bible.pdf

FINISHED PRODUCT

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

For doing this completely on my own (with the voice help of my roommate), I am quite proud of the finished product. I tried to do limited animation techniques as well as animating in twos, but I do believe that the final product ended up looking quite good for what it is.

If there is anything I would like to change it would be adding some background music as well as making some of the in-betweens a little smoother. However, even so, I do believe that the quiet ambiance of the rain helps the atmosphere of the video. The rough animation was also sort of a must, given how I did this project alone.

I am quite proud of It Started to Rain, and I'm proud to call it my final project.

Bibliography

Williams, R. (2001). The animator’s survival kit. London: Faber And Faber. ‌

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse