"Little Bird" Proof of Concept Animation

A small proof of concept animation I did for my short film pitch, "Little Bird"! This pitch was initially put together to pitch as a Senior Thesis Film at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) for the 2022-23 school year, but I ended up joining a different team instead of pitching. Which works out just fine for me! But for my own sake, I wanted to finish and round out my pitch, just for the experience. : ]

"Little Bird" is a short film about the chaos that comes with being new parents, moving, and newlywed all at once. To quote the movie "Now You See Me", "the closer you look, the less you'll see". Following that idea, the more focused you are on the tiny details, the more likely you are to miss the big picture. In this case, that would be leaving an entire baby behind at your old apartment when you move.

This short animation features one of the two main characters in "Little Bird", Quinn. Quinn is the father and is known to be a nervous wreck all of the time. It's not uncommon to find him freaking out over the tiny details, though now he is freaking out about the rather large issue of missing a baby.

Intended to be later in the film, this would be at the point of the film when Quinn and his wife Jo-Lean have arrived at their next-to-last location in the montage, and the poor gas station clerk unfortunate enough to be in Quinn's line of sight has informed the couple that he's not seen their baby all day. Quinn, having been on the verge of a panic attack all montage, has finally snapped, shouting "What?!" before (not shown) storming out of the gas station, Jo-Lean trailing after him with a hasty apology to the clerk.

Throughout the past school quarter, I've been working on various concept art for this pitch, ranging from character designs to environment isometrics, and finally this short proof of concept animation. Showing the animation style this film would hypothetically have, and proving that it would be doable. I'm a story and concept artist, not a 2D animator, so if I can do it I have confidence a proper 2D animator could, haha. I know I'm not the most amazing 2D animator out there, but I'm still quite happy with the end result of this project and would love to do more in the future!

I started the rough animation in Procreate on my iPad during workshop time in class. This would be the first image, the rough pencils. From there, I transferred the file to my computer and into Clip Studio Paint, where I finished everything else. All the animation and compositing were finished in Clip Studio on my Huion Kamvas GT-191 (my baby and angel, she's been with me for five years now, and bless her has survived so many back and forth trips from my house to my dorm over the years haha).

I did all of the lineart using a deadline pencil (specifically Clip Studio's felt pen), as that eased the worry of making sure the line weight was consistent from frame to frame. I had difficulty getting the colors of the bangs to remain consistent, but I think I pulled it off quite well!

My favorite thing to do was definitely the hair. For the most part, I animated the hair on ones, and the body on twos (save for some areas where each is swapped). I think this helped me get the hair as the secondary motion down really well.

While Clip Studio may not be the most professional program, at least to my knowledge it's not used a ton in 2D animation, it worked just fine for me for this project. : ] I'd love to take a jab at other programs such as Adobe Animate or ToonBoom Harmony one day, but that will be a later me problem haha. For now, and for my purposes, Clip does everything I need it to and more.