Strumming to Your Own Beat

A beginner guitarist finds herself struggling to learn to play the guitar. Just when she’s about to quit, she suddenly encounters a whimsical twist that changes her perspective!

As you can see, my film has come a long way from the original animatic! I implemented many changes, the most notable being the audio clips and certain shot compositions.

Throughout production, I used my reference heavily at every stage, from deciding composition, to rigging, and of course, animating! I had to do some silly things to get the reference I needed, including but not limited to: throwing a Guitar Hero guitar around, pretending to be the guitar itself, and needing to wearing a glove on my hand so I could strum as hard as possible! The timing of the audio for my film was absolutely crucial to the story, so I jumped straight into filming reference early on.

This allowed me to implement feedback early, which resulted in me finalizing all of my shotlist by week 5!

The Ji Eun rig had a few options for clothing, such as a t-shirt and a skirt. I opted for the sweater and pants, but had fun choosing the colors, eventually deciding on a beige sweater.

While creating the environment, I used a variety of 3D models to put together a room that fit Olive's character. I also filled the room with smaller paintings and album covers that I created in Procreate to fill the space. I used this opportunity to make fun references to the other films featured at Convergence!

Rigging was easily one of the hardest parts of creating this film. I spent many hours trying to rig the guitar neck and body to allow me animate the guitar in a human way, but the process was very difficult. The guitar was pre-rigged for the scenes where the fingers press down on the strings, but all other rigging of human-like movements was done by me.