'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
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.
The final storyboard I was working off of, which roughly aligns with the final product. Storyboarding was a real devil for me to learn, and at first, I did not realize how valuable they can be, so I didn't spend much time on them. With such a lack of planning, it's a wonder that I got the project done on time at all! But I pushed through it, learned the hard way, and now I know the value of having fully developed storyboards and animatics.
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'