Lonely Wolf

Wolf guy lives alone only working and eating. He takes a chance to organise a meeting with an online friend in hopes to move their relationship to something more. This animation was produced for the Animators Hour competition and the music is by Pippin Kenworthy

If you haven't seen it yet this is my new film I was talking about yesterday. The guidelines of the film was that we had to incorporate this character...

and use a section out of a supplied music track by Pippin Kenworthy.

I was tempted to use the more abstract heavy part of the track at the start but I really loved the melancholy section in the middle. As I was working on the film listening to the track over and over I heard the whistles blowing at the end which made me think of the Chuck Jones sheepdog shorts. So that's why the ending is what it is. There's also 2 possible ways to read what the ending is which is something I quite like.

Anyway here are my early sketches and thumbnails

This was the first drawing of the wolf I did. I loved the simplicity of the drawing style. For some reason I ended up shrinking the head and making him more wolf like. I wish I kept those fangs. I think everything changed when I did that shot of him eating lamb chops.

These are my thumbnails of the film. I kept reasonably close to them except for the ending

In the ending the sheep dog and the wolf were going to be bros and the sheep dog just comes over bringing a coffee/tea and he just consoles the wolf. The deadline for the entry was getting really close and that whole handing over the coffee thing was going to be a bit tricky so I skipped that. Also because of how I framed the shot the hand on the back didn't look great so the sheep dogs hand went on the wolfs hand but then that looked like something else and since that made me laugh that's why the ending is what it is.

Something you may have missed is that the wolf goes to work and comes home with a bloody sheep in the back of the car. So with the ending there's 2 possible things, either what most people will see is the sheep dog is making a pass at the wolf or the other ending is that the sheep dog has finally caught the wolf who's been killing all the sheep.

So that's the skinny about my 'Lonely Wolf' short film. It ended up winning an award at the competition I entered it in. It picked up the prize for "outstanding animation" and won me a new wacom.

Roseline

also won an award for story I think although it might have been illustration and she won vouchers for art supplies. Since I have a cintiq and Rose needs to update her intous 2 we just switched our prizes. I'm going to buy me some more oil paints!!!

Well there's another film that should be on the mondo channel soon that I worked on called "Probed". I'm not sure when that is going to be online but I'll do another post when it is

Lonely Wolf Stills

Well I made a new film and it should be screening tonight as part of Animators Hour on the Northbridge Piazza Super Screen. I'll also be putting the film on my Youtube channel tomorrow morning.

It's a very short film as it was only meant to be 30seconds and it had to use the music provided but I crammed it with as much stuff as possible... maybe too much.

Anyway here are some stills

It felt like a return to the original sort of short films I used to make before I started earning money working on other peoples shows and other commercial jobs. Those were some fun times but not really something I can afford to do as much as I could when I was younger.

Technical stuff, the backgrounds were done in photoshop, the animation was done in toonboom and grading added in after effects. I tried to approach this with as little animation as possible and more focusing on the illustrations carrying the film. I tried to have a lot of foreground, midground, midback, farback, layout set ups as well as a slight camera hand held drift. Tell me if it works tomorrow

The Animators hour is here (see below) and it starts at 8:30pm - 9:30pm

I've heard there might even be something new from Roseline in it :)