Hichem Arfaoui:
The story is the most essential point in a short film so I wanted the best story possible, but at the same time, it had to be the shortest story possible! Since I had to animate everything, I realized that every single second counted.

A good source of inspiration for me was TV commercials as some of them are really good short stories. One day I saw a commercial for the iPod with guys dancing, and it was so entertaining and fun that I decided to take up the challenge and try to create the same feeling in my film-to-be. I also wanted it to be a funny story so I imagined this comical ending...

Hichem Arfaoui:
I learned to consider a film as an overall project. I realized that there is a “maximum” time to be spent on an animation or a shot, and I also realized that the first objective was to finish the film. I used to feel like there was always something to improve in my animation. It's really hard to “leave” an animation, but for the project sometimes I had to, even if it was not as good as I had wanted it to be. I also learned not to spend too much time on an animation that the audience would barely see (for example long shots or secondary animations). It was a good lesson in waking up to the reality of production.

Hichem Arfaoui:
It took me 12 months to go from the idea to the final, rendered film. For the first six months I had a job on the side, and the last four months were dedicated to lighting and rendering.

Animation Mentor:
How much planning was put into your short film? Did planning help make the process easier?

Hichem Arfaoui:
Of course planning was a very important part of the process. Thanks to Class 1, 2, 3 and 4, I knew how crucial it was to “know what you have to do before you do it.” It just saves time! It makes your work much more effective. For example, I think watching video reference is really essential before you start anything – almost a mandatory stage. Of course, I know that from experience because in the beginning, to save time, I tried to animate an action without any video reference. After days of struggling with Maya I finally watched some video references and “saw” the movement. It was so profitable that today I watch video references for almost everything.

In my opinion planning makes you work better and less, and I'm a lazy person. =)

Hichem Arfaoui:

Click image to enlarge

Thumbnails
These are sketches I did for the design and the scale for elements of the set.

Story pitch
Here is my story pitch. I apologize if my English is hard to understand! You'll notice that the story is not the exact same as the final one.

Layout
This is the layout with one of my first blocking sequences.

Rough passes
One of the tricky parts was to make sure that the dance was perfectly timed with the music.

Hichem Arfaoui:
One of the biggest obstacles for me was the lighting and rendering stage. I did not expect it to be so painful! It took me a long time and I had a lot of technical issues. Now I know why animation and rendering are really two different jobs entirely!

Another obstacle was the sound. Since I did not have any previous experience with sound, my short film has no sound effects. So for now it's not the real final version.

While animating I regularly faced one problem: going from blocking to splining. Every time I completed the first splining pass, I felt like I “lost” my animation, like I was going from something punchy to something floating. That was really frustrating. Thanks to my mentor I found out that adding more frames in the blocking was really a good way for me to keep my movement looking good. In a way, the less you let the computer do your job, the less you have bad surprises.

Hichem Arfaoui:
The very first animation I ever did was a bouncing ball. It was for the first animation assignment in Class 1 at Animation Mentor. I was a business consultant with no artistic background when I started Animation Mentor. I've learned everything I know at Animation Mentor. So my entire short film is the result of my Animation Mentor experience!

My feeling is that Animation Mentor showed me the essence of what animation truly is. I'm thinking about the basic principles of animation in particular. To be more precise, I think I have learned to the best way to learn animation. I know I will regularly have to revisit the basics all throughout my animator career. If I keep the basics in mind I will keep on learning.

This is the occasion to, once again, sincerely thank Animation Mentor! This school is exactly what I was looking for at this moment of my life.