Super hero BPA Contest- Animation
This was a group project introducing a super hero team and showing them working together to defeat a villain. I worked with three other team members to create this, from concept to final product. Elaine and I did the line art, Kat did the coloring, Apoorva did the backgrounds, and all team members helped out with sketches and character designs. This page is the process of making the animation.
The script was created by all of the team members together, to make a story that’d showcase the characters personalities and group dynamic without any dialogue. It was necessary to make it quickly so enough time could be allotted to make the storyboard.
SCRIPT REWRITE
SCENE 1: Battle Grounds Sounds of battle fade in before the camera shows a top down view of a battlefield littered with slime-adjacent enemies and the three heroes fighting them. The next shots are close ups of each hero fighting and besting their respective foes. Each hero uses their strengths to defeat the enemies. Savory is fighting snails/slugs with garbage for their shells, and uses their spice-related bombs to make the snails dehydrate and explode (or whatever happens to snails/slugs when you salt them). Spicy is fighting a frog that uses its tongue as a weapon. She burns the frog’s tongue off with a spicy attack (either something pepper related, or literal fire). Sour is fighting an octopus by spinning around and dodging its arms while slicing at it with their scythe. Eventually, the octopus has all its arms sliced off. The defeated enemies either retreat or are just straight up dead, and the hero team celebrates victory, albeit not for long. A loud sound comes from a nearby city. The camera pans from the heroes confused reactions to the sound to a city with smoke and screaming in the distance. They all nod to each other and then run to fight the new foe.
SCENE 2: City in Ruin Once they arrive in the city, they see some substantial destruction, but no enemy yet. After a shot of the heroes arriving and checking out the destruction, a reverse shot shows a trail of destruction leading around a bend, which the Sludge monster runs around, and immediately starts causing more havoc. It hits a fire hydrant, which breaks and starts fountaining up water which spurs the team into action. Unfortunately, they aren’t used to fighting as a team, and each tries to take on the Sludge monster with individual attacks that clash and end up tripping them up. Savory first gets the monster’s attention with a spice bomb, which causes the monster to start charging towards them. The team starts to realize that this enemy is much larger than they originally thought. Savory prepares another spice bomb as Sour and Spicy get in a battle stance. Whenever Savory actually throws the bomb, Sour is charging at the monster and trying to swing at the monster with their scythe, and hits the bomb aside like a baseball. It hits a nearby building and explodes without hitting the monster at all. Sour realizes their mistake and retreats back to where Savory is. They start yelling at each other. While that happens, the spice cloud from the misfired bomb wafts over to them, and spicy sneezes out a bolt of fire. The fire startles the two and they quit arguing. This time, Spicy and Sour charge at the monster together. Unfortunately, this attack goes no better. The fire blast from Spicy hits the water from the broken fire hydrant and produces a lot of steam. The steam makes visibility next to none. Spicy immediately hangs back, but Sour, despite not being able to see, charges on anyway. They slice at a power line. There’s a shot of the silhouette of the monster howling through the fog as it gets zapped, and Sour walks back to the rest of the team slowly, thinking that the threat is over. Then the steam fades away and shows that the monster is just gnawing on the power line like the electricity is a tasty treat to it. The monster gets visibly larger, and more jagged and electric looking debris appear on its body (like its getting a power-up or evolving). Sour turns around to see that sight once another team member points out that the battle is not, in fact, over. The heroes stare in shock for a moment while the monster runs around excitedly and starts eating other objects that have electric components. Eventually the team springs into action, but not before the monster manages to cause more mayhem. As it runs around, objects seem to stick to its sticky fur. The heroes catch up to the Sludge monster as it clambered up on a car as an attempt to munch at more power lines. The monster sees them and unleashes an electric blast attack that dislodges some slime on its body and traps the team in place. They are helpless to stop it as it munches on a power line and gets another surge of power. It grows larger and crushes the car it’s on. Its head is now level with the power lines, and it starts to follow them to its source, deeper into the city. The heroes are left behind, trying to free themselves from the slime.
SCENE 3: Power Center After a few moments of despair, Spicy breaks from the slime and starts running after the monster, before turning back and deciding to help free the others first. The gesture inspires the team to actually work together. A shot shows the heroes running towards something; camera cuts to reveal a power center. A shot from inside shows the Sludge monster burst in and immediately go for the transformers. But before it can reach them, a spice bomb hits it. The camera pans over to the doorway, where the heroes all stand together. This time, they launch their attack with more strategy and an actual plan. First, Savory throws another bomb that Spicy turns into a fireball with a quick flame, which distracts the monster while Sour charges at it with a swinging attack with their scythe. Their scythe gets caught on a piece of debris on the monster, and the debris comes off alongside some sludge as they pull it back. The monster gets slightly smaller. That gives the team the idea to try and pull away the debris from the monster. With additional bombs from Savory to disorient the beast, Spicy and Sour get as close as they can to the monster and pull off the trash stuck to its body. Each heap of trash removed makes the monster shrink down smaller and smaller, until it’s only the size of a normal dog. Before Sour can finish it off, however, Savory stops them and pats the monster on its head like a dog. The team wipes off some of the sludge and watches as the dog shakes off more of it. They feed the hungry dog a battery that was on the ground from the chaos and watch as the dog eats it happily with their tail wagging. The team smiles at each other as the camera pans up to the sky. The team jumps into frame with their new friend and freezes on them. The End.
I made the storyboard using Toon Boom Storyboard Pro, which allowed me to both draw and export my drawings as a video in the same program. It was very useful and a big time-saver. At this point, the style guides for the characters weren’t done yet, so I made them generic and blank looking so the sketches could be easily translated if the final designs turned out different.
Next up was to take my story board and translate it into a sketch that the final line artists could reference. I let people choose which scene they wanted to sketch since it was too much for one person to do alone. I ended up with scene 1, Kat had scene two, and Elaine had scene 3. I translated my storyboard portion pretty literally into the sketch, with some squash and stretch and secondary action to make the movements more dynamic. Kat had the task of animating a four-legged creature, which was a unique challenge. Her sketch was traced pretty closely from the story board, which revealed how goofy some of the rough drawings in the storyboard looked. Elaine was the person who made the style guide, so her sketch was the closest to how the final product should look. She departed from the story board a bit, adding some comedic and intense accents to help with the visual storytelling.
While the scenes were being sketched out, Apoorva was hard at work making the backgrounds for the animation. It was a tall order, considering the animation takes place in a city, and therefore has a lot of buildings that need to stay in the same spot between shots. In order for the background to move around with the characters, she made them a much larger resolution than the animation, sot hey could be zoomed in on without losing detail and clarity.
