Process
The project was originally conceived as the story of a girl who wakes up in heaven, alone. Heaven was a lush, American Gothic paradise, but with no one around it's so boring that she asks God to send her back. The main themes of isolation and bartering with God carried over into the darker aesthetic of the final project.
After the vibe change, the story was built around the environment. Instead of a girl, Ida, stuck in the greenery of heaven, a man, Fennel, would be stuck in the barren wastelands of Earth. His self-isolation changed the project from a story about letting your escapism take you to places no one can follow to a story about how a festering sense of shame and duty can keep you from ever moving forward.
Fennel's first design was intended to challenge the bounds of animation. His sketchy hair and smaller bumps and details would have lent a messier, grimier feel to the short. Of course, on a time crunch this proved way too difficult to maintain, so the design was changed.
The first draft of thumbnail sketches were drawn out, then individually blown up and timed to create the first animatic. The story would follow Fennel as his sickness prevented him from fending off his demons any longer. He goes to church to plead with God. After resigning himself to never getting an answer, he allows the demons to change him permanently. Originally, the short was going to be around 5 and a half minutes long.
The first animatic showed some flaws/holes in the story that had to be filled, so a second, still pretty loose draft was used as the storyboards and color script. This draft was used to create a second animatic. The project's color aesthetic was built with low-saturation simple contrasting palettes in mind and utilized lots of Exclusion and Difference overlays.
Necessary props, and angles of props, changed over the course of pre-production, and without a strong art style solidified yet, their characterization and shape language was not production ready. The worm in particular was very difficult to pin down tone-wise. SHAME is a very atmospheric story, so at this point a background style was explored.
1
3
2
4
Finding a background style that both fit the vibe and was functional enough to make it possible to finish the 70-something backgrounds necessary took several tries. In the end, a style largely inspired by the Hellboy comics made the most sense, and allowed for a marriage between the characters and the backgrounds through shadow play.
Fennel has a limp, which was originally much more prevalent in the story. It was too time-consuming to interpret this limp into something usable in the final animation; these failed tests go to show that it would have to be downplayed.
Fennel was redesigned to look like a person who would live in the established backgrounds. His shape language was simplified and his silhouette was strengthened. Most importantly, his uneven blotchy line-weight became the key lineart style during production.
The demons were very awkward to get a design down for. They couldn't be too cute, as during test screenings they often cut the tension too much when they appeared. They were meant to be uncanny, kind of like the forest spirits from Princess Mononoke. In the end, the original design was the easiest to work with, so it was chosen and reinterpreted to match Fennel.
The second pass of the animatic was interpreted into an animation breakdown which was used to keep track of asset and shot completion. The scenes were color-coded by difficulty to protect against inadvertently leaving the hardest work for the final stretch.
The finished animatic (no sound)
The animation is largely on 3s to accentuate the silhouettes of movement and to budget time. Even though usually for an animated project you'd make sure that the rough animation is on-model, I took the unorthodox approach of doing an incredibly quick first pass to get an idea on the page as fast as possible, and then treat cleanup almost like a second pass as well, fixing things as I cleaned.
SHAME is currently in production. The first 50 backgrounds have been completed, along with the first 4 minutes of animation.