Short and Suite Series
Note: the audio isn’t available for episode 1 due to copyright.
This project presents moments and anecdotes from Southwest Airlines’ history. This footage appears on Southwest’s corporate campus in an area called the Emeritus Suite, hence the title. Because these stories had little in the way of archival imagery, I relied on a variety of tools and techniques to present these recordings in a visually appealing way.
Before I begin to animate, I provide storyboards. Experience has taught me that accurate storyboards pay off in sweeping dividends on the production side. Allowing stakeholders have input at this early stage avoids a lot of unnecessary revisions during production. Below is a comparison of the boards to the final animation.
Once the storyboards were approved I moved into production.
I used a variety of tools to create intermediate footage. I sculpted, rigged and animated the flag waver and drivers in Blender. The flag is a cloth sim. The cars were modeled by hand. Below are some of the rendered frames that were used.
The title sequence was animated in Cinema4d. It’s mograph tools provide a lot in the way of squash and stretch that allowed me to inject character into the title card.
I directed actors in the performance of lip syncing to live action footage. It was shot on iPhone and not in the preferred studio setting due to COVID restrictions. Because this footage wouldn’t appear directly on screen, this turned out to work quite well, allowing the actors to handle multiple retakes on a flexible time table.
Once the rendered images and videos, edited, and approved, I was able to move on to the next step. I hand drew key frames in Procreate using the cut video as direct reference. After the hand illustration of hundreds of keyframes, I could use an EB Synth to apply the inbetweens to the rest of the animation. Below are some of the keyframes I drew by hand.
The end result is the production of a final animation that has a hand-created look with the flexibility and speed of 3d animation.
After the successful reception of the first episode, I was approved to move to the second episode.
The audio of the second episode is from a video interview, but no other assets were available for this creation of this one. I used the same workflow here, with the addition of some traditional hand-drawn animation.