Senior Thesis Film

My work on Tutorial (Skip)

Skip Tutorial will be released through film festivals in mid-2019. As one of 3 codirectors on the film, I was responsible for oversight of the preproduction process, from storyboards to character and layout design. Throughout production and post, I also supervised a great deal of the animation process, ensuring that the characters were as on-model and in-character as possible for such a large team of animators. I also created the film's website and promotional materials.

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One of my favorite things about Skip Tutorial is that we are able to create a world which is whimsical but still rooted in real-life games. The film makes nods to geek-culture that old and new gamers can both appreciate. Doing the art direction for Skip was quite a challenge, because we had to create something that was believable as an in-game world, but still looked like a film. Early on, the directors considered puppeting parts of the animation in Toon Boom Harmony, so the characters were designed with this possibility in mind. The look of the film itself had to be tailored to a wide audience without straying too far from the gaming theme. Creating this kind of dynamism required not only looking to unique compositing techniques, but also analyzing the appeal of mass-market video games.