Cassandra Elizabeth
Followed
Followed is a 2d animated short about a convenience
store employee working the closing shift who has an uncomfortable encounter with a customer. As she starts her walk home she hears footsteps and realizes that might have just been the beginning.
Here I will show production art and talk about the process of making the short.
Storyboarding & The Animatic
The first thing I did when working on Followed was to thumbnail storyboards so I'd have a story outline to write a script around. I generally think very visually, so I often start with thumbnails and then write a script.
After I completed the thumbnails and script I recorded placeholder dialogue and used the thumbnails to time out a rough animatic. After a few rounds of revisions the final animatic was created:
The Character Design Process:
I spent a few weeks designing and redesigning the protagonist and antagonist of Followed.
I ended up with fairly messy gestural line work, as I think it fits well with a more horror or thriller style animation.
For color I wanted to use fairly cool colors for the most part, allowing the 77 Mart red to really pop. I tinted the suit of The Customer more red as well, again to make him stand out against the backgrounds.
I made Jane fairly short, and the The Customer remarkably tall and gaunt. I didn't want Jane to be particularly exceptional in any way as I thought that would distract from the idea that this sort of thing can happen to anyone.
I decided to go for a more unusual look for the customer as I wanted him to be unsettling on appearance alone, but I didn't want him to look too unusual for the same reason I didn't want Jane to. I made him gaunt with hollow cheeks, I wanted him to look like he doesn't take particularly good care of himself
Background Design: 77 Mart
For backgrounds there are three scenes, and each had its own traits that I wanted. I felt 77 Mart should feel cold and kind of lifeless, filled with stale air and the hum of fluorescent bulbs. I used a very pale washed out cool color palette for these backgrounds. Having this washed out somewhat desaturated look also helps make the multicolored interior of a convenience store avoid clashing or being distracting.
Background Design: City Streets
I wanted the city streets to be dark and kind of inscrutable, not unlike real streets at midnight. I decided to have the light-post as the repeating motif in the city. They highlight certain points, and also emphasize the obscuring darkness outside their pools of light.
I ended up giving every building brick siding, and while this isn't necessarily realistic, I think it contributes to a feeling of disorientation during the walking scene, the houses Jane passes blending together.
Background Design: The Bus
When Jane gets on the bus she's realized she's being followed, so I wanted it to feel cold and alien. As far as color the best way to communicate that is generally with green, so the inside of the bus has a sickly green overtone.
Similar to 77 Mart the lighting is much brighter here than the street, but because the situation is so much more intense I wanted to up the contrast and make darker colors a bit more pervasive.
Animation
After the backgrounds were done and I had a solid foundation to animate on I started the process of rough animation. Because of the style of animation I went for with this project no tiedown phase was needed, I could go directly from rough animation to the final lines all in clip studio.
I animated fairly linearly, going from shot to shot doing rough animation until I had every shot complete. Then I went scene by scene tweaking timing and drawing the final animations. For the coloring phase I had a fellow animator (Jasper Pendragon) help me finish it quickly so I could get to the final phase of production: adding shadows.
Once I was finished with all of the digital cel animation I needed to composite, putting the animations on the backgrounds and animating some of the backgrounds. I did this in Adobe After Effects, along with some minor color grading and VFX. The primary VFX were camera shake, vignette, and a vertical scratch effect in the panic attack scene.
This was the final result: