Legacy Grandpa
Logline:
“Following the death of his beloved Grandpa a boy is at the mercy of a Governess of the Home for Unwanted Children and its bullies with no prospect of salvation.”
Legacy Grandpa.
A short animation film - watch it here (YouTube link)
Legacy Grandpa is my first foray into the world of short film animation, with its story coming together as a direct result of wishing to enter the “Cartoon Animator At Work 2024” competition. Though I must state, it was not with any expectation of succeeding in the competition but because I learn best when I have a goal to aim for.
My goal was to pull together some of the free assets that came with the software, add on a few purchase and produce a simple “do-able” story in the time I had available – which was about two weeks. In total, I think the actual animation time to produce my five-minute short was about twenty to twenty-five hours, plus editing then foley & music and more editing.
I’ll be the first to say that I made a lot of mistakes, mainly because the software was new-to-me and because, in hindsight, I did not prepare properly before I started.
That said, I found the experience a very enjoyable one, and no more time-consuming than undertaking a live-shoot; with the added benefit of working for as much, or little, each day as I desired.
Part of the competition eligibility criteria was the production of a Work-In-Progress (WIP) reel. Both to show the judges that it was all the entrant’s own work as well as to provide educational content for other contestants and those reviewing the software. This WIP I have also provided a link to, as I firmly believe in the power of helping.
You may find my rather long WIP file
(YouTube link) here.
(Though I confess, any aspiring animation filmmaker would do better to study the Reallusion Tutorials than my very slow and ponderous workings)
Although it was a competition specifically targeting Cartoon Animator 5 software you were not precluded from using other packages as required to complete the film.
As a consequence I used the following packages Legacy Grandpa:
- Cartoon Animator 5, by Reallusion, to produce all the film’s animation
- Hitfilm for special effects, including production of the title sequence
- DaVinci Resolve for editing
- Audacity for cleaning up the dialogue
With the only hardware (other than my computer) that was used being the Zoom H1n Handy Recorder to record dialogue and a couple of sound effects.
The majority of the sound effects were from a library of sounds I had previously purchased from Sounds-Best and Film Cruz.
The music was from Beatoven.ai; an AI music facility I had been experimenting with, as the timescale was too short for my regular music collaborator to help me out – as the production was done over the Christmas holiday period and I only finished the edit a couple of days before the submission deadline.
All in all a very enjoyable experience, even though it was quite intensive on the eyes. But with the discipline of taking regular “long focus” breaks and now knowing much more than I did before I started I feel there is no reason why my next film will be better.
URL software resource Links:
Where to view the entries to the Cartoon Animator 5 competition:
All images Copyrite Nifty Newt.
