BEHIND THE SCENES

PITCHING THE FILM 

In Fall of 2022, JJ Gibson was encouraged by an associate chair of the department to pitch a short film in the upcoming Spring. Obviously, they couldn’t not pitch. They came up with the idea the following December and developed it over the next few months. Several ideas were added, altered, and sometimes removed entirely before JJ had a coherent storyline and character lineup. 

In April of 2023, the full pitch packet was submitted, and was nominated for potential greenlighting the following May. Teaser Trailer gathered its entire core crew of ten in under fourty-eight hours. 

PRE-PRODUCTION 

In June of 2023, the crew met virtually over Discord to begin the Visual Development process for the film. Because the film’s pitch already had a strong visual and tonal identity, the crew had few issues in defining the film’s style. By the time the school year had officially begun, the team had a draft of the screenplay, rough storyboards, and preliminary character and environment designs.  

Pre-Production faced two major hurdles: refining the story and establishing the visual styles for each scene. To refine the story, JJ and Brian spent multiple drafts restructuring the sequence of events and cutting superfluous scenes. To establish the visual style, the team found the specific film genre we wanted to parody and broke it down into its elements. If we could grasp what made each genre visually distinct, we could more easily satirize it.  

PRODUCTION 

Since the film consists mainly of static, wide-angle shots, character acting was paramount to selling the comedy of each scene. This was especially important for the 700+ frame full-body acting shot that ends the film. To pull off what seemed like an unsurmountable task, the shot was split up between three animators (Luke Biver, Benji Mann, and Matthew Lauerman). The rough animation was then cleaned-up and colored by Sergio Diaz and Harlow Torres. 

POST-PRODUCTION 

Using our color script as a guide, our compositors, Kacie Long and Michael Hernandez, combined the colored animation and layout to finalize the look of the film. Since each scene is meant to reflect a different film genre, our compositors employed a variety of compositing techniques. Some shots kept flat, stark colors while others involved all sorts of fancy lighting and gradients. Whatever served the story best was what we used. 

Since the sound and music teams worked continuously since the start of production alongside our animatic, we were able to have that finished soon after we completed our last pieces of animation.