"Shepherd" Short Film Breakdown
A busy animation weekend explained.
Last year I made “Shepherd” as a submission for the “Tiny Man” Film festival. Any duration of film was accepted as long as it had some sort of narrative and connected to the theme of “Blue.”
My aim was ambitious: Create a short film comprised of multiple printed and scanned in shots. My fiancé was away for the weekend, so the cats and I hunkered down in the home office and got to work. I figured it was possible if I lowered the frame rate substantially. This will work right?
Inspiration
I had been thinking about this idea in my head for about two weeks before diving into the project. Like Don Draper says: “…just think about it. Deeply. Then forget it. And an idea will jump up in your face.”
My drawings were skewing towards abstract, lattice-like structures at the time and I wanted to translate this look to motion in a more dramatic way.
As I focused on this direction, I remembered an exhibit I’d seen at the Chicago Cultural center in late 2018: Strandbeest: The Dream Machines of Theo Jansen. In this exhibit you were allowed to interact with Jansen’s sculptures, which would continuously move across the room just from a single push.
Design
I stuck to the couch potato approach of drawing out frames on my ipad in Procreate. I found creating colorscript thumbnail sketches to be more engaging than doing a simple storyboard. There’s no client here, so why not skip some steps?
What I love about making colorscript storyboards is the ability to be specific in a looser way. I can play with layers and colors, building the frames quickly while informing how the more polished frame will be organized. It’s improvisational, but also more prescriptive for the later steps in the pipeline.
I designed these frames knowing that I would lose some detail in the print process, but gain texture and unexpected imperfections. I played with light, pencil textures and wiggly ink lines.
Animation
Using ipad softwares like Rough Animator and Procreate, I animated at six, sometimes four frames per second. I love a choppy animation, but this was pushing it a bit. However, from a print standpoint, those frame rates worked out well. It meant I didn’t have to print out 24 drawings per second of film, and I could minimize the work on the back end (and minimize time sitting on my back end).
To print and scan everything in a timely manner, I rendered out png sequences from After Effects and used photoshop’s “automate” function to create a series of contact sheets for each shot. Photoshop takes each image and lays it out in an organized 8.5” x 11” layout, in addition to labeling each shot.
I ended up with a fat stack of paper and a lot of scanning to do. Praise be to the Epson XP-7100’s document feeder scanning function. Instead of putting each page into the scanning bed individually, I was able to feed entire stacks of paper in the document feeder. While this made some scans a little wonky, we’re here for unexpected imperfections, so we have to let them play out!
Speaking of imperfections playing out, one my cats (her name is Jelly) really enjoys sitting on my printer and bopping paper that comes out of it. I can’t blame her, she’s protecting our household. However, her presence during this process became a bit of an issue when scanning. Her hair was getting everywhere and it even made it into the film.
Closing Thoughts
While this was a fun exercise, I don’t recommend spending a weekend like this too often. It took a lot of out me, but it was creatively invigorating. Kind of like skydiving but far less risky, yet maybe more life affirming.
I didn’t get into it in this breakdown, but I also created the music and sound for this film, which was an entire project in itself (let me know if you’d like to know more about that process)! It’s a lot to fit in, but a deadline can be such a motivating force and I learned a lot about incorporating analog methods and staying loose during a project.
Any film you make of any duration is a little triumph. And if you’re lucky, Jelly will turn on the TV and watch it someday.
This is so fun. It’s cool how the choppy scanned frames act as a line boil to give energy to the stills and reduce the need for more animation / frames. Also, a beautiful lil film. Especially for how short it is.
Love the walkthrough. I'd be interested in hearing more about the sound and music!