Animation Short - Someone’s Subway Story

Short Films

Sep 19

There’s always something crazy going on in NYC. You can’t make this stuff up 🤦‍♂️

Short Commentary

When I started making shorts, the bulk of the content was in the ’Storytime’ format. I think I had the most fun with making those shorts because they felt more creative and producing them was less rigid. I also did a lot more hand drawing with them. Fast forward a few years and with a couple of changes, ’Storytime’ shorts have appeared less frequently in my lineup. They simply took too long to make, and their performance wasn’t optimal for the time investment. Fast forward a little bit further, and I was able to adapt the format into ‘Life Scripts’. This evolution of the format retains the best parts of my ‘Storytime’ shorts, while also making the production more reasonable.

This story in particular felt like a good testing ground for the format, even though it is the second ‘Life Scripts’ short (the first you can watch here). This subject in particular is close to me (the managed decline of New York City) due to this being my place of birth and seeing things get worse in real time. It was also a very surreal experience at the time. I couldn’t think of a better situation fit for content if I tried. If you’re a fan of my shorts, you may have noticed that I have a few about my encounters with homeless people (there are more btw). This is not a statement on their value as people, but on the failure of the governing body of New York to fix this problem. Kids shouldn’t have to be exposed to fentanyl addicts shooting up in the transportation system, and the irony of the same governing body to ask their citizens to ’Not be someone’s subway story’, yet facilitating the opportunities to do so through intentionally poor governance is not lost on me. Nor should it be lost on you.

Fun fact: New York City spends more money on the homeless than the median income

https://www.newsweek.com/nyc-spends-as-much-per-homeless-person-as-median-income-11686396

The Production

The production of this short was not difficult, but overly long. There were a couple of new spins on production I was trying out. The first major one, was developing the look so I can replicate it in Toonboom, without having to rely on After Effects or Premiere. This was important as I have previously discussed my desire to divest from Adobe software. I spent a couple of weeks working on the aesthetic, and some other time translating that to Toonboom. While I was ultimately able to do so, it is cumbersome and can be prone to errors. I did my best to turn the look into a template that I can swap background elements with to cut down production time. Ironically, this took the longest time to do when it came time to make this short. Still, at least the process is set up and can be made more efficient in the future.

The second adjustment to production I wanted to make was to incorporate mini-rigs. There’ll be a separate blog on this, so I won’t go into detail here, but the goal was multi-fold: allow me to draw by hand more, create re-usable templates that I could rig quickly and finally to see what hurdles I would face going this direction. Ultimately this move is to diversify my animation production so I’m not heavily reliant on one way to do things. This helps because for the bulk of my content over the past year or so, the shorts relied on heavy puppet rigs that slow the animation process down a lot. If I can avoid having to create custom character rigs for every short that needed secondary characters, I’ll save a lot of time. Fortunately, this move turned out very well. The mini-rig came in really handy, and while there are a lot of issues currently, once I familiarize myself with this new way of working, the effects will be great. I think it’s possible to see the potential even in this short as multiple mini-rigs were used. All of the characters except the KSP (Kyle Samuels Puppet) were rigged using mini-rigs. There’s a bit of a visual discrepancy that I’ll sort out in future versions, but I think they worked out tremendously well.

There were a couple of other smaller production related things that made this short possible. As an example, I utilized some effects that I made for Storytime shorts in the program After Effects. One of the reasons certain things like comic panels haven’t appeared in my newer shorts is because they are a pain to make, and I need to use After Effects to do it. However, since ‘Life Scripts’ are an evolved format of the Storytime shorts, I thought it important to find ways to reintegrate the comic effects. As the format matures, you can expect to see more adoption and an evolution of older Storytime effects. The final production related change was in the editing, and sound design specifically. I went for a less naturalistic sfx design and something a bit less grounded. I wanted to focus more on capturing the feeling of the situation symbolically as opposed to the exact representation of things. In some ways it took less work, but in other ways it was a bit more involved. There was less labor in the placement of the effects, but it took more time to hash out what exact sounds I wanted to use and where I wanted to use them.

Overall I learned a lot with this short. It was quite involved, and once it was finished I felt as if I came out of a long and drawn out fight. I do think it was worth it though. It feels like the elevation of the Storytime shorts I’ve been wanting to make for years.