ROLLER HEROINE.
A teenage superhero has to defeat evil: the bullying of a clerk.
Tutors Mario Addis and Gabriele Barrocu.
School Project: pre-production and post-production.
The class was divided in groups. Each team was assigned a prompt that would follow the same script: a superhero casually stumbles across an injustice being inflicted on a poor victim and takes action to defeat the bad guy. In our case, the three characters had to be a teenager, an office worker and a truck driver. We would then have to create the necessary material for a different group to start the production. I was mainly involved with the character concept and design and sound design, but we all came together to deliver the complete bible to our assigned group.
We then had to individually work on the post production to find technical solutions that would fit our own vision for the short.
Compositing and effects.
The effects I added were minor, since I already liked the flatness of the characters, and I had to solve some technical issues in the coloring. I worked on the lighting and cast shadows where needed, added a grain effect on top and created the sparkling effect of the magical spray - intentionally campy.
Character concept
We were set on having our teenage superhero to be either an emo or a punk kid, as to highlight her rebellious nature so that her helping a random, frankly pathetic guy could be perceived as wholesome, in a way. Our inspiration for Jeròme was mainly Coraline's dad, whereas when talking about the truck driver, the main idea that we wanted to convey was "big, toxic male that you can smell from a mile away and that would say racial slurs if given the opportunity".
Character design pack
Production plan
When working on the storyboard and character design, we had to be careful in submitting something doable in the little time we were given to complete the assignment, and ultimately we had to negotiate with the other group the number of scenes and how complicated the camera movements should be.
On the left, the final production plan color coded according to difficulty, on the right a more in depth analysis of the production pipeline I made myself to clarify the to-do list day by day, knowing the other team's availability.
© 2024 by Anna Xiccato