Captone Project: Bedtime
Bedtime, Toon Boom Harmony, 7:46
May 2024
Bedtime is a 2D animated short film about the rumination of embarrassing memories when trying to go to sleep. The film aims to help audience members have a better self-outlook by showing that for every embarrassing memory, a person has an equal amount of happy memories. Afterward, audience members had the opportunity to write their memories on VHS tapes that were thrown into two separate bags. Programs used to make this project include Krita for the animatic, Toon Boom Harmony 22 for the animation, Adobe Audition for voice recordings and cleaning audio, After Effects for special effects and compositing, and Premier Pro to assemble everything together. I go a lot more in-depth on my Tumblr blog in terms of what the production process was like and the day of my Capstone exhibition so if possible please check it out.
Because I was very new to Toon Boom Harmony and vector animation as a whole I decided that this scene would be the first thing I would try to animate because it gave me opportunities to experiment with everything. For example, I used the rigging tool on the brain cell dragging in the bag of VHS tapes and I was able to figure out how to pop between lip flaps and other facial gestures.
Originally I was not going to make this cut of the animation but the morning of my exhibition day as I kept playing through my film checking for mistakes this scene felt a bit off compared to the animatic. So within an hour before I had to leave I sketched, timed, outlined, colored, sound mixed, and rendered this cut all the while I was getting myself dressed and prepared for the exhibtion.
Usually doing sound effects in normal videos is one of my favorite aspects of filmmaking but it definitely became a major stressor for this project since I only left a day for myself to do most of the sound design and in animation the sound has to be built from the ground up. I'm ultimately happy with how well it came together and would gladly take a role as a folly artist but I definitely will have to give myself more than one day to do an entire short film's worth of sound.
This is definitely my favorite aspect of the project because I thought it was going to be a complete failure. During critics the writing memories on VHS tapes idea usually got the most push back for it either not being thought all the way through and because of fear that it would take time away from completing the animation. I was also under the impression that I would only have about 3 participants so I was constantly debating on how many VHS tapes I wanted to buy. But I'm really glad I stuck to my guns because audience members would say that this element really wrapped the whole concept of the project together and what I think ultimately secured my an honorary senior award.