A Perfect Morning Situation / Animation
My first short film, produced as my thesis at the Royal College of Art in 2023.
You can see it screening at the Slamdance Film Festival 2024
Fri, Jan 19th, 8:45 PM @ The Summer and David Theater
In this animated surreal musical, Mino, an anthropomorphic goat strives to achieve the perfect morning routine, but has to battle his internal critics, anxiety, and decision paralysis. This short aims to express how ADHD can feel internally, showing the day to day struggle in a visual and comedic tone.
This is a deeply personal project to me, being almost autobiographical in nature. Due to the inaccurate representation of ADHD in the world I didn't realize it was worth looking into or getting diagnosed until well into adulthood, I wasn't medicated till around a year ago. I thought it was a joke, as it's only ever shown through its externally visible symptoms.
Through this film I attempt to highlight the internal symptoms, the decision paralysis, the spiraling, the constant infighting and anxiety. A lot of the symptoms aren't inherent to ADHD but are developed if it goes untreated. My hope is that better representation can help people understand themselves better.
I am interested in expressing how consciousness is experienced, specifically by visualizing how different states of mind feel. Through the production of this film I started depicting the real world as a stage, and the mind as both the audience and the crew around it, both responsible for coordinating the performance, but also judging it along the way. I found this to be a uniquely apt way of representing how my anxiety can feel and so ended up making it the core of the film. I was incredibly fortunate to collaborate on this project with Declan Molloy, a composer who wrote the original score for it. We worked on the story and music at the same time, which gave the piece an energy I could never have imbued it with otherwise, with the music continuously mirroring Mino’s emotional state.
In order to produce it in a way that honestly expressed my feelings I developed a few techniques that allowed me to work semi-improvisationally in parts, and discover the story through the production. One of the most crucial developments for this project is a facial replacement style of animation which is more often seen in puppet stop motion, which I adapted for digital 3D use in Blender. This gave me the freedom to go off model with the character where needed, and overall develop a rougher approach to the animation, focusing more on expressing the right feeling than on reflecting any kind of physical reality.
To see a full version of the film,
contact me for the link and password.
Thank you!
The making of,
A Perfect Morning Situation.
Model Element Replacement
Throughout my masters, I have been developing my Model Element Replacement Animation technique.
It allows for extreme expressions to be made on a whim without pre planning them through a complex rig, but rather individually adapting the models and replacing them, more akin to stop motion.
I created an addon for Blender which lets the user make collections of model elements and animate a number, which in turn determines which model is instanced at each frame.
I created an addon for Blender which lets the user make collections of model elements and animate a number, which in turn determines which model is instanced at each frame.
In the case of this character, there are 4 categories of mouth expressions, each with 12 phoneme mouth shapes. This means that once lip-sinc is done, choosing which category to pull from can be changed at any point, and if needed entire new categories can be created without losing animation.
There are also 6 eyelid positions for each eye and 8 eyebrow positions, allowing for combinations to be made.
There are also 6 eyelid positions for each eye and 8 eyebrow positions, allowing for combinations to be made.
Set Design
From early in the development of the film's concept I wanted to have a visual representation of the real world within the context of the mind perceiving it.
By placing the "real world" on stage, and having the rest of the space as the mind, I could have the mind interfere as an audience judging how Mino's life is being lived, as the back stage operators keeping timings in check and supervising the script, as well as controlling things like the lighting for mood changes and focusing the attention onto different aspects of Mino's life.
As with every part of the film, the set was developed iteratively during the filmmaking, starting out by roughly putting ideas in 3D space to see how they look, and slowly adapting each part as the story itself was evolving. Each item was developed separately and instanced into the animation file, which let me start actively working with rough models and slowly switch each of them out when needed.
This approach allowed me to work faster and make sure everything on screen was always serving the story and it let me stay in the flow longer without getting stuck on trying to get each element perfect, as they could always be further polished later.
Character design,
defining Mino
As this film is primarily a character study, it was important to me to create a main character who physically encapsulated the anxiety, panic and manic behavior I wanted to portray, while also being capable of looking menacing when needed, as he also plays the role of the villain. To me that obviously meant a goat, but that might just be because they are very prevalent where I grew up.
My design process was drawing and sculpting him in many different styles in different poses and expressions I felt expressed his character, and saw how he evolved after each one, eventually coming to a design which felt really straightforward to replicate as it had all the defining characteristics I had gravitated onto.
