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Here is the final animation. The Gloom fight section took the longest, but altogether it took me 3 days and a bit to animate.

Gloom rough animatic

I wanted to make it simple and just showcase Gloom beating up some criminals.

WIP storyboard of The Babysitter.

After some feedback, I need to add more full body shots and exterior shots as well.

The Babysitter

3 minute Film Synopsis:

It starts with the child attempting to create an iDance video (like a tiktok.) The video is ruined as the babysitter is vaping and ruins the shot with the smoke. She convinces the babysitter to join her iDance video, in return, she won’t tell her parents about her vaping.

Later on, the babysitter mixes a strange concoction for the child to drink as she requested, and the child states how the video already has lots of views. She gives the child a drink and the phone rings on the counter, it’s the mother.

Mother: Hey (babysitter’s name) are in? a neighbour said our lights are on.

Babysitter: Yeah, I’m with (the child’s name)

Mother: No, (child’s name) is with us right now

A shadow emerges of the child transforming into a monster.

Either:

The shot ends in black with the babysitter screaming

The shot ends with the phone dropped on the phone with the mother calling out for the babysitter, and the babysitter screaming.

Ends with the phone with the iDance video with the child and babysitter

Clues:

The TV is on the news channel warning people about intruders in the neighbourhood.

Or

Tv is on the documentary channel about chameleons.

The script for my final project.

This is the second draft, as the first one was too vague and lacked context.

So I made the story more obvious through dialogue. It's a dialogue heavy film, so I'll be animating a lot of lip syncing. Expressions is key too.

Some updated concept art for Cordelia and Moira. I plan to make expressive faces sheets for them too and merge it with their own character bio sheet. For Cordelia, to save time on animating tons of ruffles, I decided to go with the pencil skirt design instead. I like the fact that their sclera 's aren't coloured in. It gives a unique style and lessens the cartoony look of them (compared to my Gloom character designs.

Some sketches for Cordelia done in the train.

I wanted to make the visuals more unique and give them a steampunk-esque look to their clothing. I really like all of Cordelia's clothes, they're girly and match her personality. I tried some foreshortening, but it didn't turn out very nice. I needed to make the legs more narrower.

Idea 1:

The film starts in the café, Cordelia attempts to snoop in Moira’s bag, as there are evidence files in there, and she’s desperate to uncover the truth of what happened to her father. As she reaches for the bag, she gets bonked on the head by Moira, who scolds her. She insists a spider was on her bad and she was shooing it away. They then make it back to Moira’s apartment where she receives a call to come to the station, as its urgent. She leaves her bag with the evidence files in it. A voice starts to pester Cordelia in her head but she wants to respect Moira’s wishes and not look into the files, but it’s too difficult to resist and she looks anyways. Her eyes widened as she discovers the truth behind who ordered the hit on her father and killed her. Moira’s very own boss, Chief Chuckle. She is enraged as the disembodies voice urges her to vow revenge. And so she does. She travels to the station, and it is a little quieter than usual. Her ghostly presence sends chills in the officer’s spine, but they brush it off as the breeze. She phases into his office while Chuckle is buried in paperwork. He feels her presence too, and sees her as she begins to take solid form. Before he could speak, she silences him and exposes his wrongdoings. Chief Chuckle is in denial, how could his ex-partner’s daughter be alive, or semi alive at that? He tries to reach for his gun, but Cordelia swats it away with her powers. He begs for his life, that he was ordered to do it, but anger has already consumed her. She does as she pleases, and gets her revenge,

Meanwhile Moira notices she left her evidence file and quickly takes a detour back to her apartment. When she walks in and sees the destruction left in her apartment. She realises she may be too late.

Alternate stories:

Instead of starting at a café, it starts in Chuckle’s house, as he’s giving a wholesome speech to his colleagues on his birthday. Moira’s phone blows up as Cordelia is wating for her return so they can look through the files together. Chuckle pulls Moira to the side and thanks her for her great service as a cop she admires his resilience as a Chief (to humanise his character a bit more) Meanwhile Cordelia loses patience and looks through the files anyway. The party wraps up and everyone leaves, with Moira announcing to Cordelia that she is returning soon, but it’s too late. Cordelia is already making her way to Chuckles house to confront him.

When she arrives the same thing happens, just in a different setting and she ends up killing him. Moira arrives to her apartment to see the destruction and realises she’s too late.

Idea 2:

Cordelia retells stories of segments of her life.

She begins on how she resurrected. When she was initially shot and got thrown into the sea, she thought she would ascend, with her mother. She was wrong. She woke up. In excruciating pain. She didn’t realise at first but she was being eaten, by piranhas. Mutated ones, with sharp teeth and bulging eyes. Once she saw blood floating around her. Her instincts kicked in and she shook them off as hard as she could; it was hard though, as she was underwater so her movements were slow, and she was still hazy from being shot. Her body was burning at this point and the pain was unbearable, until she heard humming and the rotten fish began to leave. From afar a figure began to appear. Not a human or a fish, somewhere in between, a siren? She approached the weak Cordelia and held her hands.

‘Do you want the pain to end?’ she asks. Not verbally but telepathically

Cordelia nodded, in disbelief at the situation, but she is merely a child in pain, she would accept anything in that moment.

‘Do you want to see your father?’ she asks

Cordelia nods again

‘You must accept me in order for that to happen. Will you accept me?’

It was a strange and vague question, but Cordelia nodded once again.

Moments later everything turned black.

She then explains how she spent years in the water occasionally rising up to shore in hopes of seeing her father, deep down she knew, he was dead long ago.

Finally, I got recommended to look at a website called Mixamo, where you can download free 3d assets to 3d modelling softwares. I downloaded a character doing a simple stance and animated a water ring round it, as if it summoned it . I used the video above to help me import a 3d asset into blender.

The only trouble I have is rendering these animations with the clear water material on it, so I need to look into rendering objects with the edited material visible, because it always turns out dark blue.

For my final project one of my characters have water manipulation powers. I was wondering if I could dabble in 3d and use that in my 2d animation. I looked at a few videos, but this is closest of what I'm looking for. The only thing I need to find is a material that has more of a 2d stylised water look, rather than a realistic one.

Here is my outcome. I couldn't render so I had record it on OBS instead. I really like the look, it's just not the style I'm going for , but I like how I can change the direction of where the water can go by editing the bezier curve. The tutorial was easy to follow too.

This tutorial was a more complicated as it involved the geometry node. There were many tweaks I had to do and it took me an hour to complete a 12 minute tutorial.

(VIDEO IN THE NEXT POST)