Production length: 1.5 months
Little Witch, Little Fish is an animated short created in a KU advanced animation course in Fall of 2023. The short focuses on a young witch, who is determined to find little creatures to use within her magic. As she explores the beach, she stumbles across a stranded fish and it's fate is put into her hands. This 1 minute animation was developed and created throughout November and December. In this project, I really focused on organizing and staying on my created schedule to meet my end goal.
Concept Art
For the conceptual phase of my animation, I really wanted to focus on the setting and backgrounds for the short. I researched not only the look and feel of the Pacific Northwest coastline, specifically the pebble and rocky beaches up there, but I also really looked into the types of fish that could be found around the area. Since my character was supposed to find and save a fish within the story, I needed something that would be able to get caught within the tidepools as well as be carried by my main character. I also knew that I would only have one character to focus on, so I really wanted to find a simple solution. I focused on different designs, but my main end goal was to focus on the simplicity of her design. I knew that my backgrounds would be painted in detail.
Background Paintings
One aspect of this process that I love is background art. The backgrounds in animations, games and shows can show so much. I really love the pacific northwest, and being able to do these backgrounds was a lot of fun for me. The entire animation, besides the fish, is done in black and white so it really allowed me to play with the values.
Production Timeline
During this process, I really wanted to focus on using Jira and Excel to organize myself and the process as I was the sole contributor to the project. I actively updated and worked on both my Jira boards and making sure they were detailed for every single shot, as I wanted to animate each scene separately before putting them all together into one video.
Scene List
For this project, since I wanted to create each scene individually before putting them all together and I wanted to make a shot list to make sure I fully knew what I wanted within my animation. There is some info that became no longer relevant with the time constraint of this project, but I was still glad that I made sure it was in there. I also started color coordinating it to what shots I was currently working on and which shots I was planning on doing, alongside my Jira board so I had another visual of where I was in the progress of my animation.
