Short Film: Update #22 background designs and another clip!

Having the majority of the outlines now out the way, the past week I mostly continued my progress with designing the background styles and colour for the film. If you have been following my progress on this blog, you may remember I posted a few initial tests at the start of this year (crazy how it’s March already)! I’ll link that post HERE to jog your memory, or indeed for if you are new to my blog and in that case, a big hello and a warm welcome!

With my new designs, I refined what I had done previously, simplifying the style in terms of how many brushes I’m using (now just the one) and creating a cohesive pipeline of creating said backgrounds. They’re conceptually close to the prior ones, still using the watercolour textured background to contrast with the smooth character style, but like I said, just that little bit more honed. I also kept in mind the colour palette I’m using: which as you’ll see, it has a pastel tone to it, something I wanted to emulate with the look. I feel this would suit both the holiday and hospital sections of the film, and be impressionistic/ atmospheric enough without being too distracting, but also have enough detail so the audience knows what is going on and where the character is. I’ll add a few below:

And a little clip of a shot I ended up cutting from the film, but didn’t want to waste, so it became a test clip:

I wanted to test the backgrounds in a variety of locations and shot size, plus a mixture of whether the character is included or not, to see how the backgrounds would translate in different situations and if they all looked uniform and from the same film. I feel they do, but I definitely will need to keep a limited/ refined colour palette when creating the backgrounds. Too many colours will lose any consistency I have across the designs.

Despite being pleased with what I have created thus far and having gone through several iterations of each test shot, I’m still just sitting with them for a little while longer before going full pelt at making all the backgrounds, incase I can think of any further ways to ‘plus’ the designs. I have already had a few days away from them, to enable my eyes to view them fresher while I worked on some other background elements, and even after three days away from them, I can definitely appreciate them in new light. And a positive light at that! I actually really like them and think they all work well together. It gives me hope for my film and to be honest, I can’t wait to see how the film plays out, once all the backgrounds are in place. I do absolutely love the look of them!

But, I am going to leave doing them for real for a little longer just incase, though I’m feeling quite certain this is the way forward. In honestly, I think I might be procrastinating a little, too. I’ll admit backgrounds is where I’m least confident in, because I have never had any formal training in animation or illustration, so somehow feel like I am searching for an illusive source of validation, or someone ‘more qualified’ than myself is going to give me some magic ‘go ahead’ to press on with the backgrounds. I feel like what if [my backgrounds] are all just ‘bad’ and that no one is going to like the film because the backgrounds look rubbish or something. But in writing this down, I can see that my thinking here is nonsense. I watch 100s of animated shorts and I basically live and breathe (pardon the cliche) filmmaking/ animation/ art and have seen such a variety of different background styles. Plus I’ve created animation stuff for years and then non-moving art stuff for years before that, so surely I’m qualified myself to decide if I think the backgrounds are right for my film?! You would think so, wouldn’t you… It would be nice if I could stop having such a low opinion of myself and everything I create. Any tips for this, let me know!! Hopefully on next weeks post, I can say that I’ve made a positive start with the backgrounds- fingers crossed!