STUDENT FILM
Student Film : Student Accomplice
Student Accomplice is an award winning student film by Brigham Young University’s Center for Animation that I had the unique and special opportunity to be a part of in its production. It has won first place at The Rookies and has also won third place at the Student Emmy Awards. It was the only student film from a United States university to have placed among the top three. My main contributions on the film were in the preproduction and early production stages with design and modeling.
The film’s setting is a large city which presents multiple unique challenges to modelers with one being the sheer volume of assets that have to be ordered into a cohesive whole, both stylistically and practically.
In spite of this challenge, I was able to be a part of helping my team create the assets we needed without compromising artistic style over the course of a continual iterative process to achieve the vision for a city set that is mostly based in reality but has a subtle touch of wonkiness that isn’t exactly legal when it comes to correct perspective.
Buildings and Streets
Because cities are so expansive they can appear to contain endless amounts of detail. We wanted to simplify our work by building modular sections of cities instead of building one entirely as one unit.
I was tasked with helping to visualize through 2D design what a fleshed out city section could look like in a shot using assets that other artists on the team designed.
I took the assets from these artists and using compositions from the story team I composited them together in these drawings to help the art director decide what was needed.
Sketch 1
Sketch 2
One task in visual development is helping and inspiring the texture artists in their job of shading the 3D assets. This part of the design process helped me learn how to be more closely observant of textures and what is and isn’t important to a texture artist.
The most important non character asset for the film was the student car. I was not the main designer for the vehicle, but I had a hand in providing support in the early stages of its design by helping to inspire its personality and character as well as stylistic directions the director wanted to lean towards. The most important lesson I learned during this process is that it’s ok to take design risks as long as they serve the purpose of the story.
One of the visual development tasks for the student film was painting color keys to find mood and lighting solutions so I helped provide options for that.
Student Film : 3 D
As an environment artist and conceptual designer, I am invested in growing my range of 3D skills. The student film gave me many opportunities to contribute to the props and assets for set dressing the city environment.
The ones that I’ve shown here are the ones I felt the most pleased with, particularly the clip board. While it’s a mundane everyday object, it serves a significant part in the film because it’s a major prop for the driving instructor character. Because it gets a bit more screen time than some of the other props, I wanted to make sure that the edges and important details were as believable and convincing as possible.
Shading by Sherry Liang
Recent Experience
- BYU Center for Animation Student Film Project: Collaborated with a team of student peers to create a five minute animated short film.
- BYU Studio 113: Worked with a team of animators to make instructional media for university professors. Created work in 2D, 3D, and using motion capture.
Letʼs bring an animation project to life!