Billy Tang:
The idea for my short film is inspired by my favorite activity: war games. I used to play assault position and always ran first into the enemy's line. As a result, I was always killed (shot in the head) by snipers. And it hurt.

After each game, we would have a little team meeting to follow up on the last game. At that time, I was always thinking of a way to outsmart the snipers from the opposing team. This is where I got the idea for the short film.

Billy Tang:
The most important lessons for me were story structure and layout/camera angle. Of course they are all about planning. I tried to keep everything simple and make sure it makes sense, looked for moments where I could build up the story so that it was more complete.

When I was making the storyboard, I was surprised by how much mood was added to the story by different layouts and camera angles, and how much the story is easier on the eyes.

Billy Tang:
So many people from Animation Mentor have given me great comments on my story. They are all very valuable to me, and my story would not have turned out well without them. There was one piece of advice given to me by my mentor Cal Brunker that really helped to shape the story. In the scene when the fly sits on the scope of the gun and Ace tries to wave it off, Cal suggested to separate the waving into three phrases. First it's small waves, then mid-force waves, and finally big waves so tension is built up and lets the audience know that Ace is really annoyed by the fly. That gives him a reason to kill it.

Billy Tang:
I followed what Animation Mentor taught me for my planning process. I started with mind-mapping, then I looked for some interesting things to put down on the mind-map and picked a few items to tell my story. Then I pitched it to my mentor, and he gave me some cool suggestions. After a few passes of pitchings, I started to create the storyboard. And when I was sure it was what I wanted and everything was working, I started on my animatic and rough blocking to work on the timing. That was my planning process.

Billy Tang:

Pitching

Pitching is hard for me. As you can see my English is not that good. Sometimes I didn't even understand what I was talking about. So I tried to use the most simple way to tell a story so the audience could understand me easily. The final story is quite different from pitching because I continued to refine the story. Lots of things were thrown away to make the story as simple as possible, but also to make sense.

Thumbnails and Animatic

From the drawing, you can tell that I really can't draw well. I just try to put as much information as possible in the thumbnails. And the animatic would give myself a rough idea of how the timing and the staging goes.

Click image to enlarge

Layout

It is just like the animatic but in the Maya environment with all the models and camera angle set in place. I think it really helps because once I do the layout, I can see the potential problem that could happen and fixing it at this point would save me lot of time then fixing it in blocking stage.

Rough Pass

I did a few rough passes. For each pass I would put as much information as possible so that I wouldn't miss anything important.

Final Render

Here it is, my first animated short film.

Billy Tang:
While creating the short film, I found the hardest part was to throw away ideas from the story that you really like. But after listening to comments from my peers and mentors, the story really became simpler and more straight forward to the point without it. And now I don't feel bad at all because you can always have better ideas.

Billy Tang:
I think of Animation Mentor as my second parents. The program helps me understand what animation really is about. Without Animation Mentor, I would never know where to start to create my own short film. I was a self-taught animator without any formal training and have been animating for some time in Hong Kong before Animation Mentor. When I look back at the work I did, I feel embarrassed calling myself an animator. Animation Mentor really changed my way of living too. Now I am always observing and sketching people and things around me no matter where I go.