Our short film Last Fish, First Boat written by writer Jenn Thornhill Verma comes out next week.
My task in the film was to create the visual counterpart to the story of Eugene Maloney, as narrated by Jenn. This project stretched my skills as an illustrator and allowed me to dip my toe into still-frame animation. We broke the story up into fourteen frames. Some frames were still illustrations, but for others we wanted to incorporate some moving parts to help hold the interest of the viewer. I had created some small still-image animated gifs from artwork before for fun but this was a bigger task.
I created all of the animations (probably the hard way) by moving layers in photoshop and combined them using the photoshop timeline function to export as video.
To learn the process I created lots of draft sketch animations to test out movements and how to create them with my characters. These test animations informed how I created the final artwork. I had to plan which elements had to be painted separately and which could be edited in photoshop later. The test animations didn’t have to be pretty, they just helped me visualize how all of the separate pieces were going to work together.
Here is a look at one of my early sketch animations
I broke down this piece into several individual components and painted them separately before bringing them together in the final animation. The separate moving parts included, the boat, alternating waves, fish, each man and a few seagulls that I would add to the composition in the final version. Here is a look at a few of the pieces I painted separately.
Here is a snippet of the final animation
Seeing the finished product come together alongside Jenn’s narration and the music and sound effects by Paragon Cause and Matt LeMay has been wonderful. I can’t wait to share it with you!