Birmingham Children’s Hospital invited Digital Animation students to work closely with them to create a 2D animated short film that could be played at the hospital for the patients and their parents. Student Georgia tells us about her experience.
We started by visiting the hospital, getting to know the people that worked there and listening to their ideas and wants for the short film. This visit allowed us to learn more about how the hospital is run, the amazing work that they do and what life is like for some of the children that are patients there.
This gave us a better understanding of the Birmingham Children’s Hospital’s values and goals which we were keen to implement into our project. This then led to script writing where we all had a chance to share ideas and world build. The story that the Birmingham Children’s Hospital wanted us to show follows a girl called Sameera who tells the audience about her experiences as a child dealing with sickness and how she overcomes the barriers that she faces.
With this plot, we came up with the idea that for each scene, we go inside Sameera’s creative imagination, seeing her as a variety of fun and outlandish characters such as a knight and a bear. Once we were happy with the story, and the script and the storyboards were approved by the hospital, we moved on to designing characters and environments for each scene. This stage was particularly exciting as we could now start to see the story come to life.
These characters were then rigged and ready to be animated. Although we all had the chance to participate in each stage, we were able to focus more on the processes that interested us the most. For me, that was rigging and animating. Eager to carry on working on this brief, I chose to continue developing “Sam’s Story” for my final major project. With each scene being allocated to different students working on the project, I was given the “Knight” scene, where Sameera, coated in armour meets an unlikely friend, a dragon. After designing the characters and environment, I was given a layout of the scene. Using the 2D software, ToonBoom Harmony, I created character rigs of Knight Sameera and the dragon.
I made sliders that carry out different functions such as a full body turn and blinking. After these characters were fully rigged, I placed them into the environment and created a blockout animation of the scene. Once I was pleased with the poses, compositions and timing, I was then able to dive into fully animating the scene, bringing it to life. I felt that previous modules throughout the Digital Animation course gave me the knowledge and skills that I needed in order to feel prepared and confident for approaching this project, such as the Character Concept Design module for designing the characters and the Performance Practice module for animating dynamic and playful sequences.
I also felt that throughout the course I was encouraged to be ambitious with ideas and to not be afraid to make mistakes. I believe that having the opportunity to work on a live industry brief has benefitted me immensely as an aspiring 2D performance animator. This brief allowed me to further develop my understanding of the 2D animation pipeline, working through each stage as a team.
My professionalism improved through various processes including learning more about pre production such as looking at brand packs, and gaining more confidence from pitching ideas in front of clients. I gained industry experience and a bigger body of work to put into my portfolio to show when applying for animator job roles in the future. Not only was this a good chance to gain a better understanding of the processes involved with working for an organisation outside of university and to gain industry experience; it also gave me the chance to throw myself into an exciting project that revolves around a matter that I care about and makes me feel fulfilled to be a part of.