BRIAN D. EDMONDSON
MOTION GRAPHICS DESIGNER & ILLUSTATOR
Not On the List
"Not On The List" is the result of the Drexel Senior Project for animators. In this project, each team is given their entire senior year to present a 2-3 minute fully animated feature. The project's story revolves around the trope of characters not being able to get inside a bar because they aren't on a list. In this project, the story is flipped as our main characters, Tre and Amanda, need to be on a list to get out of the bar.
This project is supposed to allow students to use all of their Animation and Visual Effects knowledge along with guidance from the program directors to produce a cohesive and entertaining story. This team was made up of 6 members, including Brian, all taking care of various roles in order to take the project to its completion.
Due to COVID-19, this project had to be put together entirely remote which presented its own set of challenges. Most students were working from home with equipment and software that they were not used to. Many cases in which home PCs were not as powerful as the ones available at the university. However, the team made use with what they had and turned in an amusing story.
Overtime, Brian found himself making major decisions regarding the environment. From concepts, to asset building, to lighting and rendering, he had his hands in all parts of of making the environment come alive. The main challenge was taking care of the scale. The bar started off very big to give the idea that it was full of people. With camera tricks and adjustments, Brian was able to accommodate the story while also keeping the environment reasonably condensed to shorten render times.
This was primarily built in Autodesk Maya, but there were other programs involved along the entire process. The concept art was drawn in either Procreate or Photoshop. The materials and textures were built in Maya and Substance Designer. The rendering was done in Arnold and compositing in Nuke and After Effects.
The team gathered reference from animation projects with 2D and 3D elements. One of them being Sony's Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse. This movies goal is to look like a comic book which fuses their 3D animated movie with a 2D medium. Scott Pilgrim and anime as a whole also served as inspiration for the conceptualization.
The balance between making scenes dark, but also vibrant and colorful was an interesting challenge. The goal was to give the scene a party feel without making it too bright. What we ended with was background lights with very little influence over the characters. The key light for the characters being the dance floor creating a harsh blue against a dark purple background.
