What is the cheapest feature for one person to make? Sherri Sheridan says a stylized 2D South Park-like cartoon, and shares eight tips for making one.
What is the cheapest and easiest type of feature film for one person or a small team to make these days? I would say a highly stylized, 2D animated South Park-looking cartoon. Why? Because no one can say it does not look right or real.
2D animation has always been a very forgiving production environment where the audience is used to a suspension of belief. Animated characters doing things against solid white backgrounds or very simple drawings are accepted as part of the style. The cast, crew and sets may consist of just one person in a room with a computer and a big idea.
This style of filmmaking works best for people who already have a good eye for production design, Photoshop and/or drawing. The worse the animation looks, the better the story and script need to be. South Park is never going to win any high animation art awards. The silly situations and dialogue keep us watching. The crude almost elementary school, flat sliding animation style only makes you laugh more.
It takes about nine months from start to finish for a team of people to make one Simpsons episode. It takes about two weeks to make one South Park show of the same length. Why? Because of the way the animated frames are created. In South Park there are no walk cycles with bending legs, angled perspective moving shots, or complicated in between drawing sequences. Traditional 24 fps hand drawn Disney-style animation is obviously not a good choice for a low budget animated film either.
What would Avatar have been like as a 2D South Park style film? DV, HD, 2D, 3D and film all have their own viewing strengths.
(1.) Use Good Animation Software. Programs like
After Effects and Flash can be used to make modern animated 2D feature films for very little budget. If you know Maya or other advanced 3D programs, you will save time by mapping the images onto planes or simple objects. Many video editing programs can do simple animation styles too with layers, but do not have as much animation controls.
(2.) Surreal Extreme Visual Realities. Anything can happen in 2D and usually does, which is an important idea to develop in 2D stories. The sky literally rains cats and dogs. You need to really push your story idea visually to do impossible things. Think of new ways to show things in a clever way.
(3.) Characters Appear Not To Get Hurt Or Die. 2D animation has a history of funny violence and characters with more than nine lives. Kenny gets killed each episode in South Park.
(4.) Superheroes. Create original 2D characters who can do unusual things you always wanted to do in an extreme and visually fun way.
(5.) Suspension of Disbelief. People will stretch more to get into abstract realities, impossible character movements, abilities or situations.
(6.) More Forgiving Production Environment. 2D is a much more forgiving production environment, where simple crude animation techniques are celebrated if the story holds together. 2D animated worlds are often so abstract that viewers have no expectations about how things should look. A sloppy, or crude 3D animated character will not play as well. One animator took photographs of dead fish at a market, animated their mouths up and down, and created a whole cast of characters. What types of simple animation techniques have you seen that might work great for your film?
(7.) One Person Productions. 2D animated characters work for free, are always available, never late, don’t need to be fed and do what you want them to do without complaining. Actors and crew can take up lots of time organizing. If you draw your characters, or use animated photographs or dolls, you can work on your film anytime you feel like doing a shot. Some feature film directors such as David Lynch, and Tim Burton, started out doing simple 2D animated films. How can you begin developing your own filmmaking style in the 2D realm, without having to worry about organizing large casts and crews?
(8.) Multiple Production Environments and Materials. Modern 2D is a mixed production environment bag, encompassing hand drawn, stop motion, animated photographs, digital art, vector based Flash style animations, DV elements, special effects, motion graphics, 3D and claymation. What unique combination of animation materials and production environments could you use to develop a fresh visual style? Think of easy production styles, like DV heads on hand drawn bodies to save time lip-synching and animating the face.
(1.) Hand draw characters (or use Photoshop images or
DV cut-ups) with each moving part as a separate layer to animate like paper dolls.
(2.) Scan and reassemble character drawings in Photoshop as individual layers ready to animate. Name each layer carefully (for example: “right arm”). Make sure the lips, or anything else that moves like blinking eyelids, are on a separate layer.
(3.) Add rotation points at the joints to move arms and create walk cycles in programs like After Effects. The more joints, the harder it is to animate. First get the character walking in place in a 10-second loop that looks good. This walk cycle loop then becomes one layer you can slide around setting keyframes over the background drawings.
(4.) To animate a character walking across a set, first create a keyframe at the start of the timeline shot with the walk cycle layer positioned on the left side of the screen. At 4 seconds, create another keyframe and drag the character to the other side of the frame. When rendered the character will appear to walk across the set during a four second shot.
(5.) Create background sets using simple scanned drawings, digital photos, Photoshop image collages, DV or combinations. Think in layers such as cutting out the sky and using DV cloud footage for unique visual styles and to save time while adding movement and depth.
(6.) Lip Synching can be as easy as scaling a lip layer up and down each time the character talks. DV lip synch lips can also be cut out and composited over drawn faces or objects. Try planning camera shots where you cannot see the characters lips while they talk, by putting things in front of them, or cutting to something else.
(7.) Scan and pan across large photos or drawings to create dynamic 2D camera shots and sets. Create image backgrounds that are about 3000 pixels wide. Use the ability to zoom in and out and around large photos as your camera movement. Photoshop works great for creating layered background files that can be animated like characters full of moving elements. For a city scene, you could have layers of buildings, cars, trains, birds, clouds, fog, crowds and blinking stoplights. Sherri Sheridan teaches storytelling techniques to digital filmmakers and animators with her books, classes and workshops. She’s also the creative director at Minds Eye Media in San Francisco (www.mindseyemedia.com), where she directs, produces, animates, writes and designs projects for a wide range of clients. Sherri is the author of the books, “Maya 2 Character Animation” (New Riders 1999) and “Developing Digital Short Films” (New Riders / Peachpit / Pearson 2004). Recently, she created a 20 hour DV workshop based on the books called, “Writing a Great Script Fast,” available at MyFlik.com.
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