Lucky
Lucky is the culmination of my time at California College of the arts. Completed in December of 2024, it served as my thesis film.
All animation was hand-drawn within Photoshop. Maya, Premiere Pro, and Audition were used in various steps of the creation process.
From Concept to Creation
Lucky started as an idea for a poster design, with the goal of trying different printing styles (eg. digital or block print).
The poster itself played with the idea of the lucky rabbit and how rabbit's feet are often used as a sign of good luck, but in order to have one a rabbit must have met an unlucky end.
From the beginning I wanted to keep a black and white palette, with bold reds to interrupt it.
At one point, Lucky was going to be partly animated using paper puppets. A short project (left) was completed using the puppet for a stop motion class.
Background concepts came early and the stump concept (left) stayed mostly the same through completion.
More complex scenes, such as the fence, were first blocked out in Maya. Once camera moves were finished they were exported then finished in Photoshop. This means that while blocked in 3D, all drawing and animation was done in 2D.
The fence itself proved difficult in a few ways, particularly with creating a chain link look within 2D while moving within a perspective shot.
To accomplish this I created images of the regular fence, as well as the hole, then adjusted them for each frame while time consuming it worked well and created a look I am proud of.
Roughs were the most time consuming portion of creation. They were both frustrating and rewarding. Many days were spent readjusting frames to get the right feel before moving on to lining.
From here, the road to the end was laid out, and Lucky became the film you see above.