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Official Short Film
The Process
My short film "Thought Bobbles" was made as a final project for the 2D animation college course I took. For this project, we had to come up with our own 1-2 minute short film and go through the entire pre-production, production and post-production phases of creating a film within 6 months (July to December 2024). Below I've listed how I tackled each step of making my own small movie and how I accomplished it in time.
Concept
I originally had a completely different idea for the "Final Project" but I realized that I wouldn't be able to complete it in the allotted time. I won't disclose the idea yet because I want to revisit it in the future. So I had to quickly come up with a new short idea during my two week summer break before we officially started the project. And I ended up settling on a story about my Bob character taking a math test but getting distracted by his thoughts which would appear as comical thought bubbles. A simple, funny and relatable idea, so I stuck with it. I drew a few concept sketches right after I came up with it.
Beat-Boards
The next step was to make "Beat-Boards". Beat-Boards are essentially very rough drawings that display what each camera shot in the film is gonna look like. It gives you a little overview of how the whole thing is gonna look before you make it, like a comic book. I had to force myself to not be too perfect with my drawings because it needed to be rough so it could be done faster. However, you can tell I wasn't totally successful since the drawings are still fairly clean.
Rigging
While making the storyboards, I also had to make an animatable rig for my character Bob. What on earth is that? Well a character rig is a character that you can move anyway you like to make him move and animate. Instead of redrawing Bob every single frame to make him animate, I drew every body part individually and stuck it all together into something called a rig. Using the software "Harmony Pro" I was able to move each body part and the computer would make him animate. Think of it like a puppet. It's quite complicated to explain but hopefully that was easy enough to understand.
Pitch
Then it was time to present my idea in front of the entire class. I had to make a handout to give to each person so they could read the description of my idea and see pictures of concept drawings. Then after I pitched the idea out loud to everyone, they all had to give me feedback and their thoughts on the story. But they didn't critique as much as I expected, everyone only added on to my ideas. Everyone seemed to like my short film idea so I was able to immediately continue to the next step.
Storyboards
Once the Beat-Boards were done, it was time to convert them into "storyboards". Storyboards are exactly like Beat-Boards except a bit cleaner, more refined and put together in a video rather than a comic-style page. The storyboards once in video form helps simulate the timing and gives you an idea of how long the film is actually going to be. A video comprised of storyboards is also called an "Animatic" because it's not quite an animation yet, it's just a sequence of still frames being held for around a couple seconds each. This step took me from July to September to complete so it was quite time consuming. I used Storyboard Pro to make them.
Thought Animations
Rigged Animation
Starting in October, once my rig was animatable, I made an animation schedule for myself (when I wanted to get certain scenes done) and started animating Bob in Harmony Pro. I started off with very simple scenes where Bob barely moved at all. But once I got to the more complex scenes, it was taking a lot longer and I started falling behind on my personal schedule. I'm still new to animating in Harmony, the animation course only introduced it to us in late March, so I didn't know perfectly how to use every feature to its greatest potential. But I used all the knowledge of the software I had and did my best to animate Bob as fast and smooth as possible. Around two weeks before the deadline, I showed most of what I had to my animation instructor and he gave me feedback on what to change and how to make the animation look better. But all of this is just the rigged animation with the character Bob himself. There's still all of the animated thought bubble clouds I have to talk about.
To animate the thought bubbles, I used the procreate apps on my iPad. I just drew the stick-figures on my screen (using the regular procreate app) then imported the drawings to the "Procreate Dreams" app to animate them kind of like mini-rigs so I didn't have to draw frame by frame. I made 30 different short thought animations which took a couple weeks. You can watch them all individually here.
Failed Test
Play Video
Music & Sound
Once I finally finished all the animation the day before the deadline, I searched for all the sound effects I needed online. I needed a sound for every cloud poof and Bob movement. Once all of those sounds were found and implemented into the movie, all that was left to do was the music. I made all the music in GarageBand and it's all original music that I composed. The music actually took me two days to complete (which was after the deadline) so I actually originally had to hand in my film without music, but I resubmitted it afterwards once the music was done just before it was graded. I'm an expert procrastinator. Here's the music below for you to listen to.
Final Export
Right before I handed in the final film, I quickly put to together some credits to thank all the people that helped. And I made a little after credits animation where Bob gets an A on his test to give the film a more positive ending than just "he drew all over his test haha". And now the film is free on YouTube for anyone to watch!
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