Making an Animated Short Film in 21 Days?

The task

Can you make an epic animated short film in 21 days? This is the mammoth task I have set myself.

Any creative will know there is great satisfaction (and probably dopamine) when you finish a creative project. For the past 10 months I have been slowly plugging away at my feature film ‘You Just Lost The Game’ and it is continuing to take an age to complete and is still a few years off. I’m enjoying the process of it every time I get to work on it, but felt like I needed something that could give me the satisfaction of completion. So, I challenged myself to make an animated short film in 21 days so that I could see something through and share what I can do in animation now, since I started You Just Lost The Game.

Making the idea

Along with this passion for creativity, I’d recently been made a film festival director of Crossing the Screen Eastbourne International Film Festival. At the festival’s mini pop up cinema events, we would screen powerful films of different perspectives from all around the world. Thinking back to some of the films the festival had screened in previous years and what we’d been showing recently, it stirred something in me and the perspectives and events of the current times from all over the world.

At these events is was nice to see the turnout of people who were willing to explore someone else’s perspective. However, given that the Eastbourne population is so large, the turnout really wasn’t that impressive, given the importance of the messages and perspectives of the films. Thinking back to my distribution and marketing experience, I considered what was it that the world wants. “The world” being a watchful audience of the UK. Do they want to see a harrowing documentary of the state of warfare and greed to end their Wednesday evening? As important as these films are, with the world in its country bubbles, usually the answer is no.

With this consideration, I went about designing an idea that did not present itself as this format of media and something positioned more as escapism for anyone, anywhere but as you progressed through the story you unveiled that there is something more close to the realities of the world now and start to share the perspective that faces many in the world. This perspective is what created ‘Empireless’.

Empireless is an animated short film about a hired mercenary tasked with escorting a young princess across the boarder of a falling kingdom with the aid of a demon.

The plan is to make the 2D illustrated animation in 21 days. Now, when I was presenting some friends about the idea, one of the non-animation save friends asked an animator from Golden Wolf how long an animation you can usually make in 21 days, and we both answered about 30 seconds. So to say that Empireless is planned to be 15 minutes… this is quite the feat.

How it’s going

So, where are we with the project? On day 1 I made the story and developed the characters, designed the characters, made four backgrounds and worked out the melody and main action soundtrack!

Day 2 I turned the story into a script, then I turned the script into a storyboard & animatic. Finally, I exported the storyboard/animatic into After Effects to begin timing the shots into individual Clip Studio Paint save files for the final illustrated compositions and drawings.

So, the pace is going well and am currently working through the illustration files in Clip Studio Paint. I look forward to sharing more of the films progress. Be sure to follow my Patreon for the earliest updates and become a fundamental part of getting the film into festivals or follow on Instagram for occasional updates.

Can you help?

Absolutely! Currently, I am looking for voice actors. This is a collaboration amateur production, so there is no budget, but if you want to join onto this project that is getting made by me regardless, you are more than welcome. Please reach out to me on the ‘Opportunities’ page of my website and let me know and I can send you the voice actor info sheet!

I will likely be looking for additional voices until the end of September 2024, so let me know before then!

Otherwise, you can become an executive producer of this project and have your name in the credits as one of the driving forces behind the project’s completion! To do this, select the ‘Executive Producer’ Tier on Patreon. It will help the film to get submitted into film festivals and allow its message to get seen by more people!

I look forward to sharing more about the film’s progress in the future! See you then.