The Apple

It occurred to me that I havn't uploaded much animation to this blog lately, so here's "The Apple" - my final project at animationmentor.com

The Apple
Uploaded by rafianimates

Working evenings and weekends it took about 7 months to do, from concept to completion.

Essentially it's an exercise in storytelling with a single character, no dialogue and a running time limited to 60 seconds. I was given roughly 3 months to come up with a story, create storyboards, produce an animatic and layout of all shots ready for animating.

A further 3 months was spent on actually taking these layouts into blocking, refining and final animation. By the end of the 6 month stretch I had the animation down to 2's and 3's and spent another 4 weeks cleaning up.

At the time, I actually wasn't too keen on the end result so it's been sitting on my hard drive, ignored all year, while I moved on to illustration commissions and art direction work. Having taken another look at it recently I'm a lot more sympathetic towards it and felt it might make a good subject for a post or two.

As an exercise, I now feel it's fairly successful. I learned tonnes in the process of making it particularly in workflow and conceptual stages. While I could fill a whole month's worth of posts on my issues with the animation (and a year ago I would have bored you with rants on just that), the truth is there's no end to tweaking and adjusting. As the creator of your art you're never truly satisfied. It's never quite "finished" but eventually you have to draw a line somewhere and abandon it like any artist.

I'll do another post soon with videos of the storyboard and animatic, perhaps talk a bit more about the process of making a short animated story.