Konrad Kruszewski:
It was originally inspired by a cup of milk. No really! I was in the kitchen, about 16 years old or so, and I poured a cup of milk that culminated in a giant bubble which expanded up and out of the cup before it burst. Now here is me, with my endless ability to see stuff that somehow just isn’t really there, and I thought to myself, “How cool would it be if there was an eyeball forming in that milk bubble?” That’s it. That’s my whole inspiration right there. I didn’t set out to create any kind of story, and I wasn’t consciously concerned with either traditional appeal or entertainment. No structure, symbolism, or formulas. I just wanted to kind of drop my audience into a strange room, show them an incredibly odd occurrence, and then kick them back out again. The original concept, as it had been tumbling around my head these past 9 years was just a girl waking up in a disheveled living room, going to the kitchen, pouring a glass of milk, and freaking out when the milk is looking back at her. Cup smashes, fade to black, roll brief credits.

I just wanted to present something with no fixed narrative. Like a moving piece of art whose sole purpose is to be viewed and interpreted, with no single explanation of its events. Any message or insight you may gain out of it is purely coincidental, and intended to be a reflection of yourself, not something the artist was trying to make you think or feel.

But that didn’t really fly with my mentor, who said he attempted a similar piece for his short film in college, and was met with many a blank stare. So all the other events in my film were kind of jammed in there when I was encouraged to add a story, background, and purpose to my little strange event. Was it successful? I’m not really sure. Perhaps I added far too much stuff into the animatic (I went from a 20 second deal to nearly 2 full minutes). For a while I maintained that it was a bit of an implied murder mystery, but quickly dropped that and it became a story about a girl’s own paranoid emotional breakdown. It was more pure, more simple, and more of what I had originally intended.

It wasn’t even supposed to be in 2D to begin with, but after seeing my animatic, my class was excited to see me complete the entire film in my sketchy fashion. Having never done any 2D animation beyond the scope of a pad of sticky-notes, and being a sucker for peer pressure, I naturally concluded this was the only way to go.

I decided from the very get-go that this would not be a comedy piece. I spent the better part of my schooling at Animation Mentor doing comedy gags of my own choosing, so I really wanted to go somewhere different with my final project. What I hadn’t counted on was my own eventual disinterest in the overly dramatic. When something starts taking itself too seriously, I see nothing but the absurdity therein, so it was hard do a single frame with a straight face after a while. At one point in the production, I even suggested making it a tongue-in-cheek, horror spoof comedy piece, but that was thankfully turned around by my classmates and Mentor.

Konrad Kruszewski:
It’s been said before, but there’s no reason not to repeat it: Keep it simple. Plan a short that may take you 30-45 seconds to execute. This gives you enough cushioning to stay under that all-important 60-second mark. Simplicity is golden.

Choosing between the advice of your peers and just going with your gut feeling is probably the hardest thing I’ve had to deal with. In the end, I compromised a great deal, but I feel as if my film suffered because of it. Not because of bad suggestions, but because I was struggling to balance my ideas with those of others. A short film is a piece of art. It’s personal. It’s completely subjective, so there is no right or wrong way to do anything. When in doubt, I say stick with your original vision if you feel strong enough about it. Even if no one gets it in the end, at worst you will have a piece of work that is entirely your own.

Secondly, planning is your best friend. Also, don’t switch mediums in the 11th hour of an animation course. Not unless you have any kind of prior knowledge of the medium. Hand-animating a walk in 2D is hard enough. Animating a walk in 2D in perspective is absolute madness. That said, 2D animation is the most fun an animator can have. All the limitations and frustrations brought about by 3D software are non-existent. Timing, spacing, posing, squash and stretch, deformations… everything is so organic. There are NO limitations to drawing your animation by hand, other than what you are capable of actually drawing. Over and over again. Except for walk cycles in perspective, of course. That’s an inherent impossibility, but I hear they are trying to work that out in the next release of 2D animation. None of the animation principles came out of me as strongly, or stuck to my head as powerfully as when I put down the graph editor and picked up my Wacom pen. I’m fairly certain that anyone struggling through the basics can rein them in and surprise themselves at how easy it is once you are in total control of your model and camera. So I guess that lesson would be to switch mediums early. Switch them often. But do your short film in 3D because it’s just so much more time efficient.

Konrad Kruszewski:
The entire 12 weeks of the short film term, plus the weeklong break between terms 5 and 6 were spent animating. Every waking minute of them. I still don’t feel the film is complete. I look at it now as a kind of slightly more detailed animatic. Once my 2D skills have grown considerably past the stage they are at now, and I have the willpower to stare at this character and background again, I will revisit this piece, probably shave about a minute and 25 seconds from it, and try it all from the top. 

Konrad Kruszewski:
This was the most important lesson of the entire project: PLAN, PLAN, and PLAN some more. I did little to no planning whatsoever in approaching this film. I mean, I did the barebones planning: storyboards, an animatic, reference footage, and thumbnailed keyposes based off said reference footage. But I didn’t do anything like create a model sheet for my characters. Actually, when production began, I didn’t even know what a model sheet was! This lack of preparation made for one sloppy character model, but the bits I did manage to do beforehand, the animatic especially, were irreplaceably helpful when it came to the animation stages. Having less of a stream-of-conscious production schedule may have helped, too.

Konrad Kruszewski:
Other than a brief 18-panel storyboard, the only pre-production work I had was the animatic. I created this in Photoshop, with a different layer for each frame. I wanted to do my entire film using this method, for a nice painterly look, but hardware resources prevented that. After only 20 or so layers, Photoshop just couldn’t operate efficiently on my system (which was pretty beefy at the time). I ended up jumping ship to Flash for the actual film production, with backgrounds still painted in Photoshop. All my animation planning work was done on a separate layer in Flash. As you can see in the blocking video, I would animate the key frames of a stick figure structure, add breakdowns, and then draw the character over that structure. The frames were then exported as a .png sequence and compiled in AfterEffects for transitions.

Konrad Kruszewski:
The greatest obstacle, outside of the walk-in-perspective (of which I wrote TWO into my shotlist – stupid stupid stupid!), was keeping the character on model. Her hair would change length from shot to shot, her height would fluctuate, and her facial features would be inconsistent. On the other hand, I focused so hard on trying to make the character and overall shot look a certain way that it ended up making most of the film look rather stiff and lifeless. There are other 2D shorts in the Animation Mentor vault now that are a lot more free flowing than what I’ve ended up with. Ironic, as that loose line work is what made my animatic such a hit among my classmates. On my second shot at this film, I will do my best to recapture that.

Konrad Kruszewski:
This film would have been impossible without Animation Mentor. I had no prior animation knowledge whatsoever before this school. The many long nights and short weekends gave me enough confidence to attempt anything for my short film. To be able to go from “Not in a million years!” to “Oh yeah. I can do THAT,” in 12 short months was an amazing feeling. By the end of class 4, I felt I had all the right tools to produce a short film. Clearly, I’m still a little rough around the edges, but having an understanding of the fundamentals freed up my time to focus on the creative rather than the technical side of the project.

This was also the first time I was truly forced to create a work of my own and see it through to the end. Too many of my creative hours have been spent coming up with countless exciting projects, only to lose steam about halfway through production, and moving on to something else. Sure, it’s not a very professional character trait, but it’s one every artist I know suffers from. Animation Mentor helped me find the discipline necessary to overcome that. Having a constant stream of knowledgeable insight every step of the way was a huge help, as well. The community here at Animation Mentor is priceless. Should I get stuck at any moment, or be unsure of how a particular scene was coming along, I had help from every corner on how to pick back up and get moving again.