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/ Process
How do we make things? Let's show you by walking through the process of making one scene from our short film, "June".
1.
Ideas can come from anywhere, and start as just about anything. Sometimes it's a snippet of a story, other times it's an entire world. Other times you may not even know what the idea is, but you know you have something you want to communicate. Ideas can take the shape of a scribble, a paragraph outline, a reference video, or anything else.
In the case of this project, the idea came from John Kahrs, the director, who wanted to tell a story about an elderly woman in Chicago being reconnected with her community through ridesharing.
Early sketch of June by John Kahrs
2. Story
Once we land on an idea, the next step is to figure out the story. Whether it's a short film, a title sequence, or an explainer video, every project we work on needs a story. The story glues all of the elements together and provides the overall flow. For some projects the story will be written in a script or an outline, while others are figured out in storyboards. Almost every project we work on requires a storyboard, which is a sequence of drawings showing the different scenes and actions in the project. Storyboards are then cut into animatics, which are timed videos showing the storyboard panels in sequence. The storyboards will be used as a guide to decide what needs to be designed, how the characters should be animated, and what the overall length of the project is.
A storyboarded scene from 'June'
3. Design
At Chromosphere, we place an emphasis on quality of design. We believe that the artistic direction and color of a project serves to enhance the story. We carefully design every single element of every project from scratch to create a cohesive design direction. For characters, they are always designed with specific people and personalities in mind.
Character designs by Tiffany Ford
We also design turnarounds for any elements which will be seen from multiple angles or need to be built in 3D.
Car design by Arthur Chaumay
We also believe that you can tell a story through color, and we almost always produce a colorscript for each project, which is a series of small paintings of important scenes showing the intended light and color direction. These small paintings are referenced throughout production to ensure the emotional intent of the scene is carried through to final.
Color key by Theo Guignard
4. Assets
Once everything has been designed, we begin the process of building the final assets to be used for animation. For 2D projects, this can mean creating models and libraries in software such as Adobe Animate. For projects which utilize 3D, we will model and rig all of the 3D assets during this process, such as characters, props, and environments.
3D model of June
During this process we will also develop materials for the 3D models to look a certain way, for example how the reflections on a car window will behave in motion.
3D model of June's car
5. Animation
When the assets for a scene are prepared, they will be handed to our animation team to bring to life. During the animation process, we pay special attention to the way characters act and emote to ensure we capture the right performance. In the case of June, we combined both 2D and 3D animation. In the below scene, we first had a 3D animator animate June, and afterwards a 2D animator added the animation of the two passengers.
An animated scene from 'June'
6. Compositing
Compositing is the "secret sauce" of our process. In the most basic sense, compositing simply involves the combining of each of the different elements - backgrounds, characters, animation - into a completed picture. However, in our process, compositing is where the scene truly comes to life. Our compositors apply lighting to the scene, add effects, and enhance the depth and realism of the scene with a multitude of subtle touches. In the scene below, the compositors were responsible for lighting the characters, adding reflections to the car, animating the background to look dimensional, and adding all of the tiny people and birds in the background. All of these effects are achieved by extremely talented artists working in Adobe AfterFX.
Final composited scene from 'June'
7. Sound & Music
For June, the score was composed by Christophe Beck and featured a special song by the artist Sir the Baptist. Music is often composed and recorded during the animation process, but it is finally brought together with sound effects at the very end of the process in a sound mix. A sound mix is where the audio levels for every element of the project are adjusted and fine tuned to create the final soundscape. We are immensely proud of the sound design in all of our projects, and take as much care with the auditory elements as we do with the visuals.
Audio software
We do not handle audio services in house at Chromosphere, but we work with a variety of talented musicians and audio vendors with whom we have established relationships.
Thank you for reading! While this covers the basic ingredients of most of our projects, we design a unique process for every project we work on to achieve specific goals. Have questions about how this process could work for your project? E-mail us!
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