Hector's Home
...or how to make a 2-minute animation short in 1 week.
Hello! It’s Lea again,
I hope you had a great week. If you don’t know me, it's nice to meet you! This is Sunday Spreads, my weekly personal illustration challenge. And today I want to talk about Animation! ( or moving illustration? )
A little while ago, I gave myself the challenge of making an animation short by myself in just 1 week ( don’t ask me why, I don’t even know). Here is the final film, and you can read a bit more about the making of below:
I hope you liked it! And if you’re curious, here is the…
Making of Hector’s home:
Finding the idea.
A few weeks ago, I went on a little vacation to the seaside in Normandy, and at that time, I found the most beautiful shell. My mind kept wondering what happened to this shell before it came to me. Was it the house of cute shrimps, little fishes, or maybe a hermit crab? Do hermit crabs live in France? These questions led me to this video of a Hermit crab using Trash as a home. Perfect for a short story.
And I have been wanting to try out collage through animation for a while, so I thought it would be the best opportunity to experiment. I started with Background elements ( the grains of sand) and I cut rough shapes for Hector, to see how I could assemble them digitally.
After a lot of assembling, I reached this style frame. Should be pretty easy to animate, right? …right?
2. Audio recording and Storyboard
Before starting the animation, I needed to record the few lines I had written ( yes, it’s my voice, just with a higher pitch, I didn’t have time to find the perfect child actor), find some music and Sound effects, and make some rough storyboard/rough animation key moments. And hoping, hoping it’s not too long. (The longer it was, the more my 1-week deadline seemed unreachable) In the end, it’s barely beyond 2 minutes. Not bad, let’s see how to start the…
Animaaaaaaation
Okay, how to animate Collage? I thought of 2 options:
1- Convert my desk in a crazy stop-motion mess, animate by hand frame by frame, make sure my cat doesn’t walk all over it, make sure the Camera have enough battery, make sure the SD card has enough space, have 3 mental breakdown because I forgot to lypsync a sentence and I have to start again. Make sure my tears can’t be seen in the final animation.
2- Make a digital collage rigged puppet.
I went with the 2nd option. And that was also a whole journey of its own. Yes, for some reason, I decided to make a short film by myself in 1 week and learn a whole new software (moho) to do this.
It took me 3 days to learn how to rig and animate properly, but the software kept throwing me some curveballs and bugs that, to this day, I have no idea how to fix. And the amount of animation key frames made me question my sanity:
4. Comp and fixes
I finished Hector’s Home quite chaotically in After Effects, adding the final camera move and small effects. And here is the final result again:
Anyway, let me know what you think, and don’t hesitate to reach out. I am always looking to connect with fellow artists & illustrators to share the joys and sorrows of creating pretty pictures from our heads.
See you soon
Lea
