The Zenith project was to be the summit of our learning, our peak achievement of our time at Freestyle, and, like the previous year’s Explorations project, it was mostly free, being able to once again make whatever we really wished. Something that interested me was animation, as I’ve always had a love for it but never really had a great opportunity to do it properly myself.
I decided to base my project around the combination of animation with live-action, parodying a scene from the 1988 film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Additionally, since I was working to put every piece of time and effort I had available into my senior narrative, I devised a scene using the protagonist of said film that could easily be inserted between two existing scenes.
In addition to taking inspiration from Roger Rabbit, I also figured it could be fun to include a widely recognizable cartoon as the world our character enters, and since Steamboat Willie, the first appearance of Mickey Mouse, had just gone into the public domain that year, I decided to take on the challenge of blending live-action footage and my own animation with the preexisting cartoon.
I began by creating a rough outline of what actions would occur, then a shotlist organized to count how many shots would require animation or the live actor. Once that was prepared, I built a rough animatic out of storyboard sketches to get a good sense of the timing and positioning.
The largest challenges arose with breaking down the cartoon into its component parts so as to have a blank slate to place my new additions onto. I had to reconstruct or repaint backdrops, made especially difficult by the scene taking place on a moving ship.
After I had my backdrops, I worked to estimate camera angles to accurately position my live-action actor. I directed him in the green screen studio as he mimed the actions and reactions to the other characters.
Having gotten the live-action footage prepared, I assembled it with the backdrops in place of the animatic, and animation work could begin. I worked hard to recreate the style of movement and proportions as closely as I could, even intentionally not drawing Mickey’s tail for one frame, as that error was common in the original.
Once that was finished, I just had to put on some finishing adjustments to match it to the music, and the scene was (mostly) done! I will continue to polish and expand it, of course, as I work to finalize my complete Narrative, but I am overall very happy with how it turned out!