Friday, August 29, 2008

Be Smart . . . Don't Choke

As it is with all animation projects, it's a relief to actually finish. This one was no different, and a special kind of relief was felt when I pressed "render" for the final time, as this film was meant to be done almost two months ago. Our client is an Audo-Laryngologist (throat and ears specialist) and is using this film to promote choking awareness in schools. Past attempts at choking education have had no affect on the number of children who choke each year (nor the number of fatalities).

So, Julia and I got to work on this project from the ground-up, designing all characters, storyboards, all the way down to the audio mix. The only thing we didn't do was the voices or the music. Our friend Sarah is a closet composer, so we got her the gig (her first!). The voices were performed by the doctor's 12-year old son and a surgeon colleague of his who normally sounds like he does in the film. Julia did all the backgrounds and a bunch of the prop building and character design. I did a majority of the work since she was busy growing a baby...



Overall, it was very fun, and despite a constant barrage of pickiness on the doctor's part (thus extending this project far longer than it should have been) we still got to work from home, have a lot of creative control and work on our first start-to-finish film since Film School. Plus the doctor is our neighbor and even helped my ears out at one point. We have a great rapport with him and his family, and will be barbecuing with them again before this summer is over. The website won't be up for another month or two...

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