@jennpadillart
For Crying Out Loud is my senior thesis I created at SCAD. I am very proud of how much laughter this film has caused. The completed film is embedded below.
"This cry baby has one goal in life: ruin everything. It is up to the main character, Toots, and her computer mouse sidekick to silence the crying child by any means necessary."
For Crying Out Loud originally started out as a point-n-click choose-your-own-destiny video game.
Above is a rough map of the different branches. The purple circles would be one of the four traditional endings and the red circles would be special endings. The cyan path is the path used in the film.
Like the film, clickable buttons would have been available for the player to pick their own decision and path. The game would have been available as a flash game and a series of YouTube videos with clickable annotations. The other routes were roughly storyboarded but time was limited. I eventually made the decision to cut multiple paths so more time could be spent on quality.
Below I included a chunk of the game not used in the film. Press one of the buttons underneath or one the annotations in the video to move on. There is no sound in these clips.
I wanted the player to intentionally feel like they had control over the narrative, but as the game went on, the decisions would reveal to be failures. The player would learn that they never had complete control of the narrative. No matter what path the player picked, the game would produce a random ending from four similar but different clips.
True Love is a short 1 minute long film I created by myself. A little girl sees a couple holding hands saying "I love you" on TV. This influences her to go to her dog and hold his paw.
The girl is actually a 3D model that I painted over. She doesn't really move too much through out the short. Mostly, I wanted to figure out a possible process to a hybrid film. My process is illustrated below.
Above, a rough concept art for this paticular scene.
To the right, the model I used for the girl.
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I created the background in Photoshop. I don't normally do so, but I painted the background monochromatic and then colored it afterwords. This whole film was about exploring new techniques.
In Maya, I posed the rig in the position I wanted.
On the left, I exported the rig in flat colors. This becomes the base for the girl.
On the right, I exported a normally lit version of the rig.
Below I overlay the right image on the left image so I can see the volume as I paint over it.
With the help of the overlay, I formed the character.
I adjusted the colors to match the setting.
And then painted the high lights coming from the TV.
To finish off the scene, I animated a 3 frame loop of the TV flickering.
After you have checked out my demo reel above, I have included parts of my process for a couple of my personal animated projects below.