"Light in the Dark" is my animated short film about a group of scared shadows on an office desk that learn to change their perspective, in order to make it through the night.

PROCESS

Ideation

"Light in the Dark" was conceived as a live action- animation hybrid in which shadows on an office desk are animated. In order to make this believable, I had to plan out the objects on the desk that would create a silhouette that appears human.

Here is where I planned the placement of the objects, which I decided would be on a pencil cup.

Here is the original proof of concept that I created in photoshop through photo-bashing.

While designing the characters, I kept in mind which objects would create the shape with their shadow.

With these plans in motion, I went out and bought the supplies needed to create the characters and the stage where the film would take place (done on my dorm room desk).

Pre-Production

With the objects and the set planned out. I was able to finalize the design of the characters. I even included some other characters that are made up of the less humanoid objects.

Included in the character sheets are some descriptions of the character's personality and some moments of the film that I'd like to see. Originally, these model sheets were intended for other animators to stay on model. Who knew that I'd be animating this by myself?

Next, I began to storyboard the story of the short. The entire film is choreographed to a song I wrote, so it was important to plan out the movement to every lyric.

After the storyboards, the song was finalized and I was able to match up the movements with an animatic. Now we can begin animation!

Animation

I started working on this short right after I had my first animation class. So the animation is rather simple and basic, using only basic shapes. However, I hope the use of compositing to make moving shadows would make up for this.

To see if this would look good, I tried it out with a simple animation cycle.

Since, the test worked, I used that process on the rest of the 45 animated shots. Here is a short walkthrough of the process with the first shot of the film.

Promotion

What's a film without promotion? Here is the poster and trailers for "Light in the Dark". The film was 3 years in the making and involved a lot of learning. I hope you enjoy!