Shawna & Theo: Mad Sibling Energy

Two siblings reasonably settle who gets the last piece of cake.

Role:
Writer / Director / Storyboards / Design / Animator / Actor /
Visual Effects / Sound Design

HOW IT STARTED

I started working as a Production Assistant for Titmouse Animation back in 2022. As someone who’s aspiring to create and show run my own production in the future, the job was a great opportunity to observe how professional animation comes together. Being surrounded by talented creatives inspired me to make an animated short of my own.

Working on the production side of television means I’m a liaison between the art, story, animation, and post production departments. Getting a glimpse into these worlds made me want to tackle every single department myself. To get a better appreciation for each aspect of the animation pipeline, I became a writer, storyboard artist, voice actor, art director, animator, sound designer, and visual effects artist.

TV production taught me the importance of budgeting time and talent. Any production, even ones with “deep pockets,” requires one to allocate limited resources, be they money, skill, or time. In my case as a one-person production team, it was important to maintain the scope of the project. I had to be clear on how I wanted to push myself creatively while also knowing the extent of my skill to keep my ambitions from getting the better of me. Based on my current ability and past work, I decided on the achievable parameters that would also challenge me: a one minute long 2D animation starring two speaking characters that tells a complete story.

These limitations sprouted branches of creative possibility for my animation. So began my year long labor of love. 

WRITING

I quickly settled on creating a story starring the chaotic siblings Shawna and Theo. They were a duo that had been living rent free in my head for a few years now and I had a chance to introduce them to the world. I started by writing a collection of vignettes, casting them in scenes that would help reveal their dynamic. I explored their quirks, friendship, and rivalry. While I could only move forward with one vignette, the process helped me learn so much about them. I have hopes to develop or expand some of the unused vignettes in the future.

TRYING NEW TECHNIQUES

Translating the script to a storyboard and animatic was the next big hurdle. Even stories set in a simple environment such as an apartment could be tricky to map out. I got the idea to use CG sets after observing how my show’s storyboard team tackled some composition challenges. Instead of having to rely on my own drawing skills to maintain continuity and perspective, I could just map out the space in Blender and reference it for my future designs.

THE ANIMATIC TRIALS

I wanted to think outside of my live action guerilla filmmaking style mindset by taking full advantage of the project being animated. I could tell the story in atypical ways, put the camera in hard to reach places like inside a fridge or in the ceiling. I could even put the camera in places that don’t technically exist. The animation medium provides so many possibilities, I wanted to give the exploration its due.

With a bit of trial and error, I created my first animatic.

If you compare it to the final result, you can see I cut the opening long one-take shot. Even though the shot was cool, it did not justify itself against the amount of skill and time I would have to invest, and the little result it would bring. I realized I could streamline the story better while also saving lots of work, putting the energy in other places.

I showed my animatic to my peers for feedback. They offered a lot of helpful advice, including suggesting a shot where we see the cake falling. I ultimately expanded that idea to the “heaven cake” sequence. After working the animatic for months on end, I finally crafted something I was happy to move forward on.

Now it was time to design.

Creating the Concept

I wanted Mad Sibling Energy to be my chance to stretch my bounds artistically. However, as a young, self-taught artist, I am often at odds with the ambitious vision I have in my head and what I can feasibly produce on the page. There’s only so much time and energy I can focus on each individual aspect of the film if I wanted to complete it in a reasonable time. It’s a harsh reality I’ve learned even the professionals have to deal with.

With that being said, I still planned to shoot for the moon. Lack of experience is no reason not to create something unique.

DEVELOPING A STYLE

When I initially set out to make the characters, I assumed I was going to use a traditional process: a form of the classic cell-shading technique where I would ink the characters, fill in the shapes, and add shadows and highlights. As I went on, I saw an opportunity to create something more distinctive.

SEMI-LINELESS STYLE

 I devised a workflow where I keep the characters’ original rough, sketchy lines, only cleaning up the most egregious areas. Afterwards I would lower the opacity of the lines, change the blending mode, then go back over in paint. This Semi-Lineless style felt like I could truly take ownership of the art direction of my animation.

DESIGNING BACKGROUNDS

Mad Sibling Energy was my first foray into designing backgrounds for animation on my own. (Okay technically I made backgrounds for “Was She Really the One?” but I’d hardly call those complicated.) This time I actually had to think about not only traditional background fundamentals like perspective and form, but also a little interior design. What did Theo and Shawna’s apartment look like? Who were they?

After all of the effort I put in, I finally had the characters, backgrounds, props, effects and overall look of the film. However, it's one thing to draw everything. It’s another to make them move.

New Approaches to Animating

With every project, especially my animated ones, I use it as an opportunity to try new tools, techniques, or software. Using my iPad Pro for the design phase revealed its power and portability, quickly solidifying it as one of my main tools for this project. I decided it was worth browsing the iPad’s 2D animation offerings as well. 

SETTING MYSELF UP FOR SUCCESS

Before I started the process of animating, I had to think about my future workflow. Though Toon Squid is a powerful app, it didn’t have the functionality I needed to bring the film across the finish line. If I was going to spend weeks to months animating in Toon Squid and then sending it to my Surface Book for compositing, I needed to have a clear idea of the labor that was required. What would be the best way to experiment and figure out the pipeline?

The solution: an animation test. I selected a shot from the animatic to go through the full process of animation, compositing and visual effects. This process would reveal any complications with my workflow or any issues with my artistic gambles such as my Semi-Lineless style.

I chose shot A004 to be my animation test because it included both characters, the main prop, my most re-used background, and camera movement. If there was any shot that would reveal flaws in my process, it would be this one.

I sent my animation experiment shot into After Effects and I brought it to the final look. The test proved to be a success, so I went about animating the other shots.

Now that the animation was done, I exported each layer as PNG sequences and imported it into After Effects. Now I was in the endgame for the animation.

Post Production: The Finishing Step

The post production phase is all about enhancing the animation, using visual effects and sound design to immerse the audience in the work. I used this phase to push a style. For example, even though I drew the animation frame-by-frame, I wanted to give the illusion that it was filmed with a camera. I would add some blur to the background to mimic a shallower depth-of-field as well as adding a hint of camera grain. I also added the slightest bit of line boil to the shapes to inject some visual interest.

ENHANCING THE CAKE FALLING SEQUENCE

The goal for Mad Sibling Energy was to push my creative boundaries, and there was no better moment to do it than the Cake Falling Sequence. It originally started as a throwaway gag but it has since escalated into the most dramatic, over-the-top moments of the story. I knew I wanted to have an epic, orchestral score as the cake descended from the heavens, flashing specters of Theo and Shawna throwing rock-paper-scissors hands, but I didn’t know exactly how it was going to look. I decided to leave the choice in the visual effects phase. I made sure I had all of the components to be creative. I exported Shawna, Theo, and the cake’s animation on their own layers and tried out a few things I could make with these key ingredients.

With trial and error and a bit of creativity, I decided to really push the lighting effects, and flash different callbacks. For example the fridge design briefly appears in the background. I’m overall super happy with how the sequence turned out. It still cracks me up.

SOUND DESIGN FOR ANIMATION

From the sound design perspective, animated films start with next to nothing. Live action projects usually capture production audio, and through recording Foley and including other enhancements, it brings the soundscape into something larger than reality. Animated films have nothing sound-wise to work off of. Also, the raw audio from recording sessions is usually very clean and studio-sounding. It doesn’t initially project like it’s coming from the actual location of the scene. I had to influence the reverb of the audio to make the sound believable. Mad Sibling Energy proved to be my most difficult project from a sound design perspective ever and I learned so much from it.

FINAL THOUGHTS

What started as an animation I wanted to make after seeing professionals became a year-long passion project that helped me stretch my capabilities. Mad Sibling Energy is an expression of how far I’ve come as an artist and I’m proud of it. I can’t wait to tackle more ambitious projects with my new knowledge. And with luck, this may not be the last time you see Shawna and Theo.