EPIC: The Musical
About the project
This short film was for an Animation pipeline class where we went through the process of creating a 2D animated short from concept to final compositing. I worked as a visdev artist and background lead, helping to bring our idea of what Jorge Rivera-Herran's Epic the Musical album would look like fully animated. The musical is centered around the Greek hero Odysseus and his journey home from the Trojan War. We ended up choosing a spot in the musical where we get a flashback to when Odysseus first meets the goddess Athena, and she becomes his mentor. We were heavily inspired by older animated movies like Hercules, Sinbad, and The Road to El Dorado as we felt it fit the vibes of what we would want to see if Epic was a fully animated movie.
Color Script
After exploring different concepts for the time of day, our team agreed on setting it in the early morning, just before the sun was visible. This allowed me to add in some of that early morning fog, making it feel mysterious at the beginning, while also allowing the fire to really pop as it came into the scene.
Backgrounds
Challenging shots
The first challenge was the spinning shot. Since this was my first time doing backgrounds for an animation, this shot was the most complicated one to figure out. Our team lead and I worked together on this, doing research and a simple test run before I moved on to the final layout.
The second challenge was figuring out the animated floor. Since we had chosen a style with hand-painted backgrounds, we weren't sure how we were going to pull this off (considering I didn't have time to paint that much detail per frame). After playing around a bit, I realized that if I did almost all of the lighting via effect layers, then I could "fake" the majority of the lighting on the moving floor. This allowed me to only need to paint in the base colors, while using a particle brush to make the light feel like it danced with the moving mosaic.
