Secret Animation Project (There are gifs inside!)

An artist I really like, Ash Thorp, made a comment once that I've found to be true. I don't remember the exact quote, but to paraphrase it was along the lines of "Your passion projects will lead to client work similar to them". Basically if you do a project just out of passion or love and it looks cool, people will probably contact you to do similar work for them. That was the case with this project, as the producer of a film contacted me about this after seeing my work from Past Away.

So I actually can't say much about this project because the work that I did on it was before production began, and I'm not sure where it went. I didn't end up working on it, but the director and producer really liked what I did, so I think it ended up not happening at that time.

What I can say is this work was done as an internal sort of proof of concept, showing what this sequence might look like in the film. I have to jump around and be vague because some of the work was done 100% by me(the stuff shown here), and some other things I ripped off the internet and cobbled together, because I needed to put this all together over a weekend.

There was some Native American themed symbolism involved in the project which was really fun to learn a little bit about and on the technical side it required a lot of the After Effects style animation I came up with while working on Past Away. What it really is is animation without much hand animation, and trying to tell a story more with moving pictures vs full character animation. Here's some of how it works.

The first step is doing a round of thumbnails and storyboards to figure out the compositions and the camera moves, then when I illustrate these in Photoshop, they're done in layers based on what I figured out in the previous step. Depending on what I want the camera to do, that will determine what parts of the image need to be broken up into what layers.

Below you can see what these shots look like in Photoshop.

There was also this little fire asset that I used in the shot with the old Native American man, and I also used it in another shot that I can't show, but although it looks very 2D, it was actually made in 3D via a particle simulation.

So yea, sorry I can't talk much about the story and all that, but hopefully you can get most of it from the illustrations. Let me know what you guys think in the comments below.

Upvote, comment, and resteem if you wanna support me making and posting more stuff along these lines! Thanks for looking guys and gals! :)