Conception

The truth about this work is that I am still a little bewildered that it was made. As in, if I had to pick one thought that crossed my mind the most number of times while making this film, it would have to be: I really don’t know if this is going to work.    

I know, I’m sure that’s how any filmmaker feels—the completion of their works, especially some of their first, emerges as no small miracle. But this film was an experiment in, oh, perhaps five too many ways? On top of which is that, even though I made this during my spring semester, it wasn’t a part of my curriculum as an Animation MFA candidate.    

I know. That’s so confusing. Some context:

On January 2022, I had just finished the introduction course to hand-drawn animation in my first semester of the MFA journey. And, going into spring, we were to make our first in-school production. It was a traditional challenge at Rochester Institute of Technology: to make a 30-second film.    

You might have noticed that this film isn’t thirty seconds long. In fact, it’s a hundred second film (a label dedicated to my poor professors, who could only watch in confusion as I juggled something like... nine different hats). It germinated innocently enough as one of the ideas for the 30-second film, but once it was out, it very quickly grew too big for that bucket.  

It budded out of a desire to try something new. Something different. I had used ToonBoom Harmony the semester before, only to discover (no offense to the industry-standard software) that I hated working with vector lines. It wasn’t even about animating—I just couldn’t handle the feeling of drawing in vector.

I just don’t want to compromise the feeling of... imperfection (for the lack of a better word). Don’t get me wrong, I admire smooth perfect lines. I just don’t find them particularly interesting. It’s a little like... okay, this is a gross exaggeration, but, it’s kind of like the  pureed meal kit they fed dad when he was in the hospital.

In a lump of pureed roast beef, everything has been resolved for you. Sure, it’s a lot less work for the chewe— I mean, the viewer. Which is fine. But I think we sometimes forget that the viewer might not necessarily want less work. That the viewer might desire to fill in the gaps with their imagination, to have to actively engage, squint their eyes to figure out what something is.

We so enjoy tapping into that conflicted want for confusion with storytelling, with open endings and strange little mysteries that never get answered. Yet, when it comes to animation, we somehow default to pursuing the shiniest, smoothest, sharpest image.

Don’t you ever see an artist post their work process on social media, and click back and forth between the rough “sketch” and the finished work, before heaving a great, tragic sigh? And, with a sinking feeling of grief to all the hours that the artist poured into transforming one into the other for thinking— oh, didn’t you just polish that beautiful sketch to death and walk it to its grave...

Speaking of overkill, I could start quoting my own essay that I wrote last year on how I interpret this thing often labeled “imperfection,” but you get the point: this was the kind of thought behind this film.

Even though I failed to make this the production for my coursework (I simply couldn’t get this story to fit into 30 seconds without losing what it was) but I couldn’t give it up. I had the need to try and make this film—to use rough penciled lines to convey and compromise information, to splash it with uneven watercolor imitation washes, and flip through them at 12 to 24 frames per second. Just let the film flicker, and waver, and shudder, for the entire hundred seconds.

The best part was that I really, sincerely, didn’t know if it would work. I wasn’t utilizing these flickers to “make it pretty,” but was just going to let them loose. The flickers would exist because, and only because, that’s how drawing comes. And because I didn’t know if it would work, I had to find out.    

The truth is, there’s just two things about me: I like making things, and I dislike not knowing things. This project was about to solve two itches.    

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The Process

Because the whole point of this film was to try something I’ve never done before, every step was a new experiment. I had a very specific vision on certain things, such as the story and the semi-loose pencil lines, but was willing to leave other aspects to just... emerge as I went.    

That was not my usual. As an avid maker of things and the producer of our school’s animation team, I plan meticulously—constantly throwing together bite-sized tasks on the fly and using them to build or alter big execution plans. But with this production, the deadline was half-hearted. It did exist; I was using the school’s semester-end screenings as motivation, because things seldom get done without some version of carrots. However, since this project was not a part of my curriculum, there was no real consequence of not meeting it.

Thus, I was able to grab more risks than I would ever dream of taking in something I’d have to deliver. I could choose to wander down the path that I knew would lend better, more interesting results, over the one that would put me on track to safely complete it before it was due. I could take three days more than I knew was wise in noodling the animatic and redoing layouts, and then put off finalizing the water monster’s design to see how much budget I’d end up for bells and whistles. It was the wildest, scariest, and the most exciting thing, that I want to claim never to want to do again, but also know myself not to commit.

It was also how I ended up with two versions of the film—one consisting of linework only, and one with full color.

No, I won’t deny that it happened largely because I ran out of time. The great spontaneity of planning (in the loosest possible definition of the word) had its drawbacks, because by the time I knew that I didn’t have time to do any coloring at all, it was less than a week to the screenings submission deadline. I’d had better chances to bail throughout the process, and by this point I was knee deep. There were people expecting to see it. Not many (I just hadn’t told many people), but enough.

I spent a few minutes sitting in front of my desk wanting to cry, but tears didn’t come because I didn’t really regret anything. So instead, I just picked up my tablet pen, opened one of the scene files, and started putting some things together.

It started off as a tentative suggestion to a gigantic problem. But once I rendered this and watched it a couple times, I was surprised I could see it working. And I had been so ready: if it appeared as a cheap cop-out to coloring, like having “I Ran Out Of Time” written all over it, I’d just call the whole thing off. No screening over showing a mediocre work, in a heartbeat, a thousand times over. Sorry, realized I couldn’t do it. The screenings-goers can have a hundred seconds of their life back.

But I found myself intrigued with this new approach, because it was one answer, if not the answer, to the concern that had plagued me as I animated: that the feel of the linework would get lost over the blocks of color. This approach, in that way, was actually closer to my initial motivation for making this film— fuzzy, imperfect pencil-esque drawings that suffice to make things come to life, via carefully curated storytelling and animation.

Of course, only if I could pull it off. But with this sliver of hope, I tucked the pilot scene on my belt and continued to animate. I did some minimal white-outs behind characters so they wouldn’t be see-through, and once no more drawing edits were required, I unleashed the overlay treatments.

The closer I got to completion, the more I grew anxious. Sure, I could babble about my artistic intent. But what was I to think that it was good enough to make it work? Why did I ever think screening this was a good idea? Gosh, I was so screwed!    

Perhaps, I wonder now, if somewhere within this process, this film had taken a life of its own, because it gently but firmly walked me through completion. Through some kind of miracle, it got the thumbs up from my advisor. And, on April 28th, 2022, it screened.

I will remember those hundred seconds, and the following few minutes of questions and comments, for a very long time.

It was a couple weeks later (after the great rush of having it be chosen for two different honors by the school!) when I had time to sit down, pull the piece back out of the folder, and be faced with the question: should I color it?

It seemed like a stupid question before I actually tried it. Or, rather, grew more and more alarmed as I colored and colored for hours. Thing is, it was impossible to just... pour color into areas. There were no “areas” in the first place. They were fully recognizable to the human eye—here’s the bucket, here’s the hair—but they weren’t defined. Which was the whole point of the film, of course.

But now, as the colorist... I did the math, panicked a little, and started to reconsider. I still didn’t know if color was going to improve it rather than eating up the linework. I got it to work without—why bother? Plus, my doubts before screening it hadn’t been unfounded, either; there were (and are) numerous things that bothered me about it that coloring wasn’t going to fix. Shouldn’t I just put a seal on it and move on? Go make the next film!    

But when I closed my eyes, I could see the first style test I had made in February: the flickering watercolor-reminiscent wash. I wasn’t done yet. It wasn’t even that I wanted it colored. I just wanted to know what it looked like when it was colored, when it reached the version that I had first envisioned it to be. Would it work? How would it work? Oh, if I could just... see it, with my own eyes!

So I sighed and told myself, well, it’s an awful lot of work to have done only to not have my initial question answered. Might as well.