How I Animated My Short Story

05.06.2019:
My animation teacher told me to come up with a brief story idea for the animation project. I immediately started reading random writing prompts to get inspired, and I finally did. I quickly wrote up a rough summary of the idea, and sent it to sir. Here is the summary I wrote:
“The MC (as a young kid) is writing a letter to Santa Claus, wishing that he could become a hero when he grew up.
He forgets about it, until Christmas morning, he walks downstairs to find his parents killed and Santa standing over them, wielding a glowing sword. Santa escapes using his magic powers, leaving the MC shaken.
Act 2: Twenty-Five years later, on Christmas Day, he’s finally tracked down Santa’s location, where he finds Santa sitting on his ice throne, and finds him to ask why he killed the MC’s parents. Santa responds by saying that this is the only way that the MC could become a hero, before attacking him with the sword. The MC, retaliates with his own sword, and there’s a fight scene. The MC disarms Santa, who congratulates him for becoming the hero he always wanted to be. But the MC, who had an ulterior motive all this time, kills Santa. Putting on the dead Santa’s hat, he declares himself the new Santa, and seats himself on the ice throne, finally the villain he actually always wanted to be.”

At this point my class barely knew how to animate a person moving, so I’m pretty sure that I went way above my animation skill set when planning out this story. Fight scenes are very difficult to draw, and I had no idea how to deliver on my promise.

06.06.2019

The next day, during my Visual Storytelling class, the teacher told us that normally animators record the sound before starting the animation, to get an idea of the time frame. This was when we realized that we’ve never worked with audio before, and we had no idea how to add sound to the animation at all, let alone adjust it to match the time frames. Our animation teacher later told us that he would teach us how to do that the following week.

11.06.2019:

I attempted to draw a frame-by-frame test animation to prepare for the assignment, and it… didn’t go well. The canvas I’d drawn on my iPad was a different size to the one in Animate, so I had to keep adjusting the size and position of the artwork for every frame (very difficult when there’s about 50 frames for that scene). Even when I placed them as best as I could, the animation was super jittery.

So I decided to keep the sprites and background as separate entities the next time I animate. But the overall test was successful: I found that it was possible to draw on the iPad; export to Photoshop to remove the background; transfer to Illustrator; and copy the sprites onto Animate without any quality issues. This will really help me out in the frame by frame scenes.

12.06.2019

Our animation teacher taught us the process of adding audio files to the animation, but I still had to figure out how to edit the audio itself (remove background noise, etc). That night, I wrote up a four-page script for the story, and realized that I would have to animate 39 scenes for the assignment (the most I’ve done so far was 3), and most of them would require hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation, because of the way the “camera” was supposed to move. I’m really making this a lot harder for myself *sigh*

Attached below is a sample of the script:

EXT. MC’S HOUSE. NIGHT.
A week before Christmas, 1983.
SCENE 01: An establishing shot of the MC’s house. It’s snowing, and there is one light switched on in the upper
floor bedroom.
INT. MC’S ROOM, MC’S HOUSE. NIGHT.
SCENE 02: MC is seated at his desk, writing a letter to Santa.
SCENE 03: Close up shot of the letter.
MC
(thinking out loud)
Dear Santa, this year, I want to be a hero, like the ones in the cartoons they show on tv!
SCENE 04: MC finishes writing and holds up the letter to inspect it.
FADE TO:
INT. MC’S ROOM, MC’S HOUSE. MORNING.
Christmas morning.
SCENE 05: MC rushes down the stairs to see what Santa has brought him.
SCENE 06: Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he sees Santa standing over his parent’s bodies, brandishing a gleaming katana, and holding his gift sack on his shoulder. His eyes are gleaming red like a ghouls, and there are smears of blood on his face.
SCENE 07: MC gasps
SCENE 08: Zoom in on Santa’s face.
SANTA CLAUS
Your turn, boy.
MC
(narrating (adult))
That was 25 years ago. That day, I began the hunt for the man who killed my parents. The man who tore
…
The story seems dark enough for my taste. Hopefully it won’t be too hard to animate it…

14.06.2019
I drew about 4 storyboard frames, 35 more to go.

17.06.2019
I completed all the storyboard frames, and I sent them to sir.

24.06.2019

I tried making an animatic for the prologue using my voice for the dummy dialogue, and it was terrible. Animate seemed to have some trouble keeping up with the audio syncing for longer than twenty seconds per scene for some reason, so I had to keep exporting the file into a .mp3 and checking the timeline to readjust the frames. Hopefully this won’t be a problem in the actual animation because the scenes will be much shorter.

26.06.2019

I started making the first scene (establishing shot), where the camera essentially zooms in on the MC’s house from above, but something seemed off. Then I realized that merely drawing one frame and zooming it didn’t consider the relative velocity of the elements. SO, I drew about five frames mid-zoom, using a four-point perspective-ish drawing style.

The snowfall animation is pretty rusty, but I’ll have time to work on that later. I tested my dad’s voice as Santa Claus, and it sounds pretty good. Only need to play two of the audios at the same time, with the lower track having a super intense reverb to get that evil effect. I commenced work on Scene 02, recording myself writing a letter in slow-motion and using that as reference for the hand movement. The rest of the image will be essentially still.

27.06.2019
I started building my sound library. Realized that for some reason, Animate can’t import MP3 files, so I had to ensure that all the sounds were WAV files.

03.07.2019

I started drawing scenes 2 to 4. The were mostly static scenes, with small frame-by-frame animations.

I decided that three tracks of my dad’s voice, played at the same time at three different frequencies, gave a very demonic and threatening sound, perfect for the evil Santa. I also recorded my voice for the young MC, and transposed it upwards by two semitones. Seems to work.

05.07.2019

Scene 05 absolutely killed me. It was barely two seconds long, and I had to draw about 30 different frames to show the young MC descending the stairs.

06.07.2019

Scene 06 allowed me to use a different canvas size. I used a longer canvas, and once I added it as a symbol on Animate, I was able to drag it along the screen while the MC stayed in the same place, making it look like a tracking shot.

07.07.2019

I started making the music for the animation. I wasn’t that sure about using licensed music, because I might upload this on my art account later on, so I decided to compose a piano arrangement for the story. Once I was happy with the first track “Anti Claus” I started recording it by keeping my Skullcandy Hesh 2 Headphones inside the piano’s soundboard and playing. But that resulted in too much vibrations that the melody couldn’t even be heard.

08.07.2019

I recorded my dad’s dialogue as Santa, and used video reference of him speaking to lip-sync with my artwork.

I also found an online sequencer that I could use to create the music on the laptop itself, thereby giving me a crystal-clear music track. After composing “Anti Claus” digitally, I tweaked it on Adobe Audition and added it to the animation project.

09.07.2019

I ran into an issue while animating Scene 08. The background music was overpowering the MC’s narration, so I had to water down the music.

12.07.2019

For the Dutch Angle scene, I had to figure out a way to rotate the scene while zooming it onto Santa’s face. But it kept pixelating, so I had to superimpose a new high res frame to replace the pixelated frame.

I convinced my brother to voice the adult MC. Halfway through, I realized that he was making pauses in incorrect points, and I had to figure out how to splice and edit voice tracks on Adobe Audition so that I could fit them into the animation.

13.07.2019
I composed a new piano composition called “Snow Combat” for the brief fight scene. This time in addition to the piano arrangement, I added a dubstep-style dark drum beat, and an electric guitar strum.

14.07.2019

I started exporting the background shots in PNG format to retain its high resolution, and it seemed to help the exterior shots in Scene 10.

I also made a really cool opening credits scene, and a cool logo using the font “Nightmare Pills”. The animation will be called “Anti Claus”, like the background music.
18.07.2019
I finally finished the animation project. I had to cut a few scenes, and edit some of the animation, but it seems it’s pretty well done.

This animated short is available on youtube at https://youtu.be/BimNX63YPiE

Thank you for reading my Behind the Scenes!