CROC//EXILE short + a buncha concept art

so this past school year i had a thesis film to work on.  i dont know what happened, a rut or my own doing or whatever, but i ended up putting a film together at the very very end of the school year.  here's the video first, ill talk about it and post a buncha art stuff below !  sit back and enjoy

CROC//EXILE on vimeo

so yah ! i ended up creating an animatic and doing all the production work in a week and a half.  it was really really wild. one thing i wanted to do with my film, months before working on this, was to embrace the spontaneity of animation and just be a lot less stiff and calculated about everything.  being so calculated can get to this point where i feel like i'm in this super uncomfortable balancing act of managing a lot of things and moving on begins to feel more daunting, it's just not as fun and it's so much slower of a process.  it's rewarding when it eventually clicks, but i'd rather be covering more ground and make my personality more active while working rather than building up this calculated thing that is cool but most likely doesn't mesh with how i think i should work.

//i wanted to do something like this so bad, this was from a couple days before i began to lay down the film you see now

so i struggled a bunch trying to figure out what i wanted.  but i definitely knew i wanted to take advantage of the fact that, even though it's so common to see animation as this heavy handed task that has to take so much time, you could just readjust you're expectations and standards and cruise through something and have your creativity much more engaged throughout the production process.

//a much earlier thing i had done that captured the spirit of what i wanted

//laying ideas like this down were super fun to do, no planning just building up from whatever i started out with

so i think because of that desire, getting the story and moments down became this super daunting thing that i avoided to move forward with.  i knew all the fun was ready for me once i could figure out that preproduction stuff, but i guess i became super choosy about what i went for, or the things i came up with had never clicked, or i just didn't want to see what would happen if i pursued something and see that initial idea that got me excited change as i worked on it.  i like those vague visions of what i'm imagining to create, and the more i put it down the more that ambiguous magic is ruined...or something !  i don't really know

//dis good

 //doodles were so stress relieving but they kept making me want to scrap what i had been slowly trying
to build up, there was something there i wanted but didn't know how to control or pinpoint

//i had a super fun idea for a baba black sheep thing in the beginning of the year, but couldn't move forward. 

i got super caught up in trying to make the writing/story good and was too calculated about it, so i moved on

so of course i was put in this position where i was forced to do exactly what i wanted; i had less than two weeks left to hand in a final film.  and it sucked a lot only after i laid down my story--which definitely was a culmination of all the time i spent trying to start--and began to start animating, i was racing time and making much more compromises than i wanted to and there was a lot of negativity in my head as i made this thing, but only for a couple days and then as i accepted everything, things went pretty well, the more compromises i let myself accept, the more comfortable it was to just work.

i was cool with my idea but never really knew if it was going to land, i was still unsure about if it would work and if the soundtrack (that i imagined would be throughout the film) would help carry the areas that i couldn't imagine working, but i just had to focus on putting down scenes and hope for the best.

all this art with the two characters in it is all from before i started on the film.  the characters were so appealing to me but i still couldn't get started, i had a vague idea of what i wanted and just drew things hoping my mind would click and follow a tangent.

//while looking at this i always imagine that they are meeting in secret all romantically, haha

so yeah, i pretty much put down as much as i could when finishing the film. it was crazy animating and struggling on one part for hours knowing that i was screwing myself over, and then being able to lay down another scene super quickly, and then not knowing how to even start another shot. but the craziest part was the day of the deadline.

i passed out while attempting to lay down as much sound as i could, woke up, turned in what i had, amazingly ended up being able to hand in an updated version early the next morning and somehow added the ending burger sequence and did a bunch more sound work.  that was the coolest thing ever.  i had the idea of the burger ending the same day as the deadline but as i composited and laid sound down i had to turn the thing in without it. coming back to turn it in with that added ending and a lot more sound work was an awesome moment before handing it off.  that was the moment where i felt like i got a taste of what i originally sought out to do, that desire to be able to make a film super quick, with a sense of spontaneity and certainty, and being able to end up with something that amuses me because at some point things shifted out of my control and turned into something i didn't fully expect.

OK IM DONE///

thanks for reading, checking out this blog, and/or watching my film.  i always get pumped when little spikes of visitors check this stuff out, or if there's a random love in other places.  i've never tried to hustle hard with my stuff so it makes all that stuff pretty cool to me.  i definitely am super excited to move on and do new things and play with what i can do now when that drive strikes.  started to learn 3D stuff for myself and i'm working on a video game with my brother and a friend...and doing a bunch of music and soon some crazy video edits to go with them. ill post all that stuff here as time goes.  woo, here's more art !

//the original croc drawing