Animation Short - Devilish Desires

Short Films

Jul 25

Angel vs devil fights always happen at the most inopportune times. The struggle is real 😭

Short Commentary

You know those situations where one of your brains tells you to do something you know you’re not supposed to do? I can’t be the only one this happens to! I figured this was a common enough situation (especially in light of the rise of platforms like onlyfans) to make a short for. It can be hard to look away from a beautiful woman, and while I think beauty should be admired, there is a thin line between admiration and lust. It feels like these days it’s all to easy to give into that temptation, but it’s sometimes we have to listen to our better angels and look for ways to snap out of the trance. So this short is an attempt to explore that situation using classic devil/ angel tropes. I wanted to show how easy it is to slip into that trance and choose to indulge in one’s devilish desires and how the result of doing so can have painful consequences.

The other thing that I wanted to mention was that this short is part of a ‘devil vs angel’ series of ideas that I’ve wanted to make for years (going back to 2023 when I made my the shorts ‘Free Ice Cream 1 &2’). There are many reasons for the delay, but I think the largest one is that I wanted to make it in Toonboom (to take advantage of it’s tools) but the puppets were too bulky to do so. I could have hand animated it, but I don’t think I would have been able to have as clean of a look as I wanted without increasing the production time (which was already large for this short). The idea of the series was to give myself an opening to tell different types of shorts that might not be comedy oriented. As I get older, the importance of God, morality, righteous living and so on grows in my mind (this is not to say it was never important, it always has been to me, just increasingly so). I see a lack of it in society and a lot of pain because of that. I think that art is one of the best ways to help trigger a discussion about these difficult to speak about scenarios that we all go through and fight with. There are a lot of people who might not be able to fight off these urges, or even know how to (and still may not even believe it to be an issue), but if they see something that points in a direction that helps them overcome their battles, then the art can become something more than just art. It starts to have a medicinal quality to it that aids in the healing of another, which I think is pretty amazing!

Production Commentary

Devilish Desires had a lot going for it as a production. Right off the bat, it might be the longest 30 second short I’ve made so far. It took about 3-5 weeks to complete (depending on if pre-production is counted). This is an exceptionally long time for producing shorts and not something I’m looking to repeat again. Secondly, this short also has 4 characters that are all animated to some degree, along with the application of a new rigging technique I call ‘mini-rigs’. How the Toonboom files never crashed with all of this going on still surprises me!

The most interesting thing about this production was probably the application of the ‘mini-rig’. I didn’t want to use a 360 puppet for what would be a one off character, but I was also concerned that if I hand drew everything the style wouldn’t be consistent. After doing the design of the volleyball girl, I went straight into Toonboom to sketch her out in her context and make her rig. This took longer than I expected, as I am still learning the best ways to rig these types of characters. However, once the sketch was done, I was able to use my ‘asset displays’ of character pieces to ink and color the character so that they fit in better with the style. I don’t think it’s 100% consistent (simply due to the setup of the joke), but it worked out really well, and it’s convinced me to focus a lot of time on updating the ‘mini-rig’ templates.

There were several challenges and hurdles for this short that made it balloon in production time. The first was that when making the assets I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to give the angel. Initially it was a sword, and spent a good amount of time making it, but it didn’t feel right for this short. I’m a big fan of artwork depicting St. Michael the archangel with crucifix spear, and settled on making that. As mentioned previously, the ‘mini-rig’ had its own issues, but the regular rigs had problems too! Having 3 heavy rigs that can turn 360 degrees and customizing each of them was a laborious task. Certainly not as bad as I would have assumed, but not great either. It was just a lot of customizing. The V6 rigs made it a far more pleasant experience than it would have been otherwise because they allow for quick swaps of clothing. The other issue was the preview and render times. These files took forever to render previews for in Toonboom. Some cuts would take 30+minutes to finish rendering only for me to see a mistake, fix it, and take another 30+ minutes to preview. It was maddening, but I think all of that struggling gave me excellent understanding of my production issues in Toonboom.

Apart from those issues, the rest of the production after animation was finished went pretty quickly. The special effects wasn’t hard to implement, though I did have some trouble tweaking the voices in a way that I liked. Overall, I’m satisfied with the project, even though there are some issues in the final piece. As a pilot for a new series of themed shorts, I think it’s a good base and I’m excited to see where else I can go with these characters.