Tenant is a short film I made in 2022 as a student while taking some film & animation classes. In Tenant, the sole resident of an apartment building that slips erratically between surreal worlds has a mundane encounter with a bird. My inspiration for this was two part; the emergence and infectivity of multiverse settings in popular media, as well as my own musings on the balcony in my college apartment while I watched the ravens that hung out across the street. I imagined escaping the world from the comfort of my balcony, and then I imagined being unable to stop escaping the world, over and over again, from the confines of my balcony. I was fascinated by the feeling which that idea caused, and I set out to create a slice of life story to capture such an experience.
In the long term, I intend to adapt the character and setting of Tenant into a longer and more in-depth animated film. For now, I'm working on refining my skills and style however I can.
I animated Tenant with a combination of hand-drawn ink artwork, digitally drawn and painted animation, and experimental visual effects, in Adobe Photoshop & After Effects and DaVinci Resolve, with sound effects taken from Adobe's sound library as well as many of my own recorded foley.
The following is a brief edit of my favorite shots from the film, or a highlight reel if you will, and below is a link to the full two and a half minute video on Youtube.
My favorite shots from the film
A bit about the process:
Tenant was created over the course of a semester as a thesis project and class assignment. It was my second semester learning 2d animation, so a lot of what I did on the project was learn-as-you-go and improvisational.
The biggest challenge I faced was methodical: I hadn't taken the foundational classes in animation or studied anything similar, so while I had guidance on the production process, I didn't have the experience yet to implement it efficiently. I lost a lot of time, therefore, on planning mistakes and wasted time, and worked to make up for those losses with creative approaches to the technique and the visual storytelling.
I also learned where the technical limitations were in the software and hardware I was using. I ran in to memory issues with Adobe Photoshop and figured out how to create small and efficient animation files, which gives me the freedom to use Photoshop's illustration and layer blending tools even when working on a low-memory laptop.
Through the challenging aspects, Tenant gave me a great proof of concept, creatively and technically, that I'm using as the foundation to the style I animate in now.
I studied the motion of birds in youtube videos and nature docs, identified common centers of gravity (more or less) and used that basis to create my keyframes and animate off of them. I don't do it exactly like this anymore, but this method helped me learn and got the desired results.
The setup: Wacom Intuos drawing pad, photoshop, and lots of hours in the lab. I'm still basically on this setup when I animate, although my process is more restricted to the digital space since I don't have a large bed scanner like the ones I'd use to digitize high quality physical artwork at school.
Drawing and painting process for a simple background. In a lot of cases, the vision for a landscape will come to me and I'll be able to roll it out without much designing. In most cases, I'll need reference images and a more compositional plan for what will end up on screen.
Click above to see some unrelated mini animations (external link to Instagram), where I'm working hard to develop my style and technique and go further from what I made with Tenant