For the past four years at Carmel High School, I’ve been constantly involved in the school's annual film festival. During my freshman year, I heard about the festival towards the end of the year and decided to make a small animated movie for the show. It was an eight-minute 2D animated comedy short about a grandfather who has to take son to Costco. It was called Lenny & Roy, and it took about 3 months to animate. I’m pretty sure it placed last in the category of Open Concept, and I was the only contestant not in the school's Video Production course who entered. The next year, I wanted to make a more lengthy, visually engaging, and funny animation that would be sure to at least make it somewhere in the top 3 of the Open Concept category. In about 4 months, I made a 10-minute 2D animated film called Animated Junk, full of short skits and animated jokes that I recorded with my friends Chase McCrystal and Hans Taagen. I was confident in the film and entered it into the festival my sophomore year, hoping it would place. It was cut out from the show and not even placed in a category to vote in - which greatly hurt my confidence in my animation skills. I was convinced of never entering the festival again after that, as it felt a waste of time and would just destroy my confidence as an artist.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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However, after entering the Video Production course the following year, I decided I’d try once more to make an animation for the show. I made another 10-minute 2D animated film called Dante’s Toys, which follows a kid with his living toys. This time, I spent 5 months working on the movie - making sure the writing, voice acting, and art were all as proficient as possible. However, due to technical problems and trouble with obtaining voice actors, I was forced to rush the film towards the end of its production. I finished about a quarter of the film staying up a whole night before the film’s due date. I was devastated that I couldn’t make a product I was proud of, and I knew I had no chance in the festival. However, that year, I won first in Open Concept and Audience favorite - which I didn't expect at all. This gave me the courage to continue entering the film festival, and made me excited to hopefully pursue animation in the future.
 

 

 

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Since I had won the film festival already and my goal was complete, I wanted to challenge myself this year with the next film I’d create. Instead of a 2D animated film, I wanted to try and make a 3D animation. I’ve had about 10 years of experience in the world of 3D animation, with an application called Blender 3D. It’s a free, open-source program that could be considered an industry standard

for 3D animation. I decided to use this program and make a 3D animation about an alien visiting a world with only 3 people. I wanted to make another comedy and have it be around 10 minutes once again. I planned to give myself about 5-6 months to make the film and have it rendered in Blender’s 3D engine called Cycles. Cycles was a ray tracing engine, which gave scenes great realism and beauty - but required immense time to render and process. While about halfway through writing the script and designing characters for the film, I decided to watch a compilation of the Grammy-nominated animated short films that were playing at the Osio Theatre in Monterey. Though the films were short, the art was very thought out and explored. Each one had its own distinct art style and approach towards storytelling. Some had lots of dialogue to carry the story forward, while some had none and instead used visuals to move the characters forward. Though some were short funny films, most were very emotional films with heartfelt stories and characters. Walking out of the theatre that night has forever changed the way I want to approach films and animations. I love expressing comedy through animation, but telling more sincere stories through animation was something I knew I wanted to begin perusing - or at least integrate into what I do now. So that night, I wrote down new ideas to approach for my next animation.
 

 

 

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I finally came up with a concept I felt excited to approach. The story would follow a young girl whose father, a guitarist, gives her a keyboard to begin playing. As she falls in love with the keyboard, her father’s job as a guitarist begins to wither as the money he makes doesn’t provide enough for the both of them. When he gets a new office job that provides them with much more money, he takes the keyboard from her, as he’s worried she’ll follow the same path he took as a failing musician. As she’s frustrated with this, she rejects talking to him. As the father continues going to work very late at night, he gets in a car crash falling asleep at the wheel. In the hospital, he tells his daughter to continue pursuing her dreams as a musician. She does so and eventually becomes successful as a keyboardist. When her father dies, the hope and trust he had in her allows her to continue her life as a musician. I was sure that this story would be fun to pursue and write. However, I wanted to deliver this story without any dialogue throughout the film. So instead of writing a script, I drew an extensive storyboard with captions under each panel, explaining the scene. I used this storyboard to guide the entire film. After sketching many character designs, I finally finalized the daughter and father's design - along with the side characters.

I then wrote down a timeframe of when I should finish the animation, music, rendering, and editing. Now that I lost a month of production because of this new story idea, I decided to set deadlines for myself. I set deadlines to finish modeling and rigging characters, designing and modeling sets, rendering each scene, and editing the film. I had to finish the movie by the film festival deadline, May 17th, if I wanted it in the show. Through this timeline, I also had to create a 12-piece collection of artwork for AP Studio drawing, finish applying for college, and film and edit another 10-minute live action film for Video Production. However, I was very thankful that my gracious English teacher would let me create this film as a final project for his class.

Because I had less time than I had planned for and so many other projects within the same timeframe as this animation, I knew I had to do more to conserve time. I decided on making this film only about 5 minutes instead of 10, which was definitely doable (as the story didn’t really require a lot of extensivenesses). I also had done research on a new beta engine the Blender team was in the works of, called the "Eevee" engine. Instead of Cycles ray-tracing engine, this engine ran differently. It was made to be a real-time engine, which means a rendered view could be shown in real time without rendering. It could emulate the look of a Cycles render without taking the time to process, however it wasn’t as accurate. For example, light could not bounce as it did in Cycles, and materials were not as pristine as they were in Cycles. Plus, this engine was in the beta stage, and the Blender website warned that this engine could corrupt files as it’s only in development. However, as I have many projects to finish in the next few months — and only a late 2013 iMac — I knew I didn’t have the time to process an animation through the Cycles engine. I decided to take on this new engine and the risks that may follow with its use. And with this, I began the animation portion of my film in the beginning of February.