Animated Scene For a Christian Movie

Here is a scene I animated for a movie that I alongside other 3 people wrote for a Christian event.

The project initially started in December and had in mind a 15 minute movie following the life of the Centurion from Jesus's death. Out of those 15 minutes I was challenged by the vision of the other 3 to write it in three different ways: 5 minutes of movie, 10 minutes of 2D animation that was going to go back and forth with the movie, and ending on a 5 minute theatrical play, that the main actor was going to perform over and over again, three days in a row every 20 minutes, for the approximately 2000 of people that were going to see the event.

The character Design process took about a week to reach it's final stage. Some characters were easier to create than others. A lot of the inspiration came from other Disney and DreamWorks 2D iconic character designs.

Also, As you can probably notice in some of those designs, there are certain faces that needed to be followed in the design. That is because of the fact that some of those characters appear in the movie portion of the film, and so they will need to be recognizable in animation format as well.

Sadly tough, the writing process of the final screen-play took way more than anyone could have ever anticipated. A lot of ideas came and passed, and the ones that stayed got changed next meeting.

And so, with 5 weeks left I had to finish the animation part. Because that was impossible for one person to animate something good looking in 2D frame by frame animation, we needed to cut our losses and leave only one animated scene in the entire movie, which was the first that has a 53 second length. It may not seem much, but for one person to do everything on it, is a lot.

To put it in perspective, The Hunchback of Notre Dame has an animated runtime of 1:31:00 and had a team of somewhere in between 100-300 animators who worked on it, taking them 3 years to finish.

Which means, at most, 1 minute of animation took a professional animator around about 2 years. And here was I, with no prior 2D animation experience, making my first animated movie ever.

Now, I am not going to seek acceptance or praise or anything like that because seeing the final product, just right now after finishing it, I can tell that there are a lot of things I would do differently (such as incorporating Adobe aftereffects for the lighting, since mainly the entire animation was made in An, use Symbols, and so on). In other words, all that I am trying to say it to lower your expectations a bit when watching those animations.

Now, I may not have been entirely honest when I said that it took me 5 weeks to make 53 seconds acceptable animation.

In reality, I finished those 53 seconds a while back and wanted to finish another important scene to the movie, which sadly, because it was too complex and complicated for me, I could not.

Why was it complicated and complex? Well, because it involved something a beginner animater should never attend to if it did not animated even a rolling ball before: water.

More specifically, a full blown 32 seconds storm at sea.

Overall this experience was stressful, but on the bright side it got me hooked into animation and wanting to learn what else can I do if I actually take some courses on it and learn how to properly use Adobe animate. This is only the beginning and it only goes upwards from this.

Here are the links for the two animations as well as a link to the storyboard version 1 to part of the movie:

Finished Animation:

Storyboard:

Storm Scene: