2019 Student Film: Visible Ink
Directed By Eduardo Resendez
(8 minutes long, hand-drawn animation. Final (Capstone) Film at the University of New Mexico.)
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"A 10-year-old boy accidentally brings his imaginary friend to life. While this new friendship starts out great, things quickly take a dark turn..."
From 2018-2019, I worked with Eduardo Resendez and my fellow classmates on a hand-drawn short film called Visible Ink.
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I learned a lot from the experience, so shortly after wrapping up, and some introspection, I decided to write about what I learned through the struggles of a small-scale, student animated production.
What I Learned From This Project:
As we were such a small team of students, (six core team members,) I took on more tasks across our pipeline than I had originally planned, but I did so to the best of my abilities.
My main contributions were screenwriting, animation clean-up, digital "Ink and Paint", background art, and voice acting. (I also stepped wherever I was needed, such as assisting with recording, file management, After Effects compositing.)
My Main Contributions: Pre-Production
Screenwriting:
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Visible Ink's story was based on a combination of ideas and concepts from Eduardo Resendez, Justin Doubt, Yvonne Garza, and myself. Our goal was to write a short film that highlighted the real-world problem of childhood bullying, in a fantasy setting.
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The story went through many, many iterations. We had frequent meetings in and out of class. where we broke down the message and the key story beats, before the semester had begun.
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Each week I presented a new draft of the story to our core team, as well as presented it to our class for feedback. We would perform it ourselves, take notes on it from our classmates and instructor, and then I would go back and rewrite and edit over the rest of the week.
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Finally, after a period of re-writes by me, the team was given the "green light" by our instructor to start recording the dialogue and begin production. (Minor tweaks and clarifications to the screenplay and shot list were made throughout production, but it was a good start at this point.)
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Casting:
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We had a couple of local casting sessions, searching for the right voices for our characters. Ultimately we chose Russel Casados as Cooper, Taylor Betzen as Joslyn, David Baca as Liam, and, in a strange twist of fate, our director chose me as Isaac. I know that might sound a bit egotistical at first, but it was the director (Eduardo) that cast me in his film, not myself casting myself, and the rest of the key crew (and our instructor,) happened to agree with his choice, so I was recruited that way. I was not expecting it, but I was happy to help out in any way necessary.​
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Recording:
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Our team was able to record at Santa Fe Center Recording Studios in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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For the recording day, I prepared recording scripts for each human character, as well as for each creature's unique sounds. The creature sounds were largely improvised on the day based on some ideas that we prepared beforehand, but the character dialogue largely stayed the same, with some minor tweaks based on our actors' performances.
A scene from the script, written by me.
Pre-Production Color Keys.
(Original drawings by Sierra Ray, Colors by Myself & Sierra Ray.)
Recording Day at Santa Fe Center Recording Studios. Photos by Justin Doubt.
Production & Post-Production
Complex, multi-plane After Effects composition by Myself.
Behind the scenes photos by Jonathan Tibbets and myself, via https://www.instagram.com/ifdmcapstone/
Animation Clean-Up:
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After the lead animators and in-between animators worked their magic, the sequences were sent to me, where it was my job to go frame by frame and do Animation Clean-Up, before it went onto the coloring phase. My purpose was to gave the linework from our animators a cleaner, more consistent look.
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Just to be clear, I did Clean-Up on some of the shots on this page, but not the original key drawings. I don't want to accidentally take credit for their insanely hard work!
Digital "Ink and paint":
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After clean up, I added color to each character and prop in each scene, based on the color keys that we established during pre-production.
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Through most of the production, this was primarily done by me and one other team member doing clean-up and Ink and Paint, but as the deadline got closer, our animators and director stepped in to help speed up the process.
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Background Art:
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I was asked to paint background art for most of the exterior shots in the film. This turned out to be an enormous task, as much of the film takes place outside, so in total I worked on approximately fifty backgrounds for the whole short.
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(Justin Doubt provided the backgrounds for interior scenes, and I provided the exteriors.)
Uh, spoiler alert, dude!
Background by Myself.
Post-Production:
I didn't contribute as much during post-production as I did in the first two phases, as many of us were still working on coloring assets and the last of the backgrounds while editing and assembly were happening, but I helped out wherever I was needed. I did get the chance to help with...
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Compositing:
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I did help with compositing a couple of shots, most notably the complex, multi-plane forest chase scene, which features several background and foreground elements in motion, simulating motion.
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ADR:
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We got most of the necessary character and creature voices before production, but we did an additional ADR session to make sure every performance was up to our director's requirements.
Poster Art by Eduardo Resendez
In Conclusion...
Working on this short film was a great learning experience for me. There are definitely things that I wish I had done differently during production, and flaws that I wish I could go back and fix before presenting it to the world.
There are narrative elements that I wish I could go back and change, (and not to mention drawing skills that I wish I had developed further before diving in...) BUT I learned a whole lot from this experience, so in that regard, I would consider this a success.
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Here's the short.
Whew, it's over!
Background by Justin Doubt.