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
We decided on setting the time of day just before the sun was visible. This allowed me to add in some early morning fog, helping the scene to feel mysterious and allowing for great contrast when the fire came in. We also loved the sun rising behind Athena, allowing her to feel even more powerful as a goddess.
Backgrounds
Challenging shots
The first challenge was the spinning shot, since this was my first time doing backgrounds for an animation this shot was quite a doozy to figure out. Our team lead and I worked together on this, doing research and a simple test run before I did the final layout.
The second challenge was the animated floor. Since we hand painted the backgrounds, I had to figure out how to do this without spending an unnecessary amount of time on it, since hand painting each frame would take too long. I managed to pull this off by doing the base colors and necessary details on each frame. And then all of the other lighting and details were done via effect layers on top.
