What If?

What If? has not been publicly released yet and is currently only available to judges and recruiters. Continue below for a behind the scenes look at how this film went from a "what if" to a reality! 

Story

After the film was pitched, a full animatic was boarded to develop the story. The story then continued to be refined throughout the layout and animation stages of production.

The Characters

Cassidy and August are the heart of the film. As such, a lot of time was spent developing them so they each came alive with their own personalities. This project is my first time working with more than one human character, which was a new challenge for me. One goal when working with both characters was to ensure they complimented each other while still feeling like unique characters. 

Cassidy

Cassidy is the protagonist of the film. She's bright, quirky, dramatic, anxious, and an expert at overthinking! A lot of the inspiration for Cassidy was pulled from myself. As someone with an anxiety disorder, it felt natural to pull from my own experiences while creating a character with anxiety. 

Throughout the film Cassidy takes on many different roles beyond her normal teenage self. She becomes a clammy handed girl, a bride left at the altar, and a nun. The clam hand rig is part of the main Cassidy rig, with a custom attribute to toggle it on and off. The nun and bride each have their own body rig, but share the same facial rig as the main rig.

August

August, aka August Alexander Jackson, is the secondary character in the film and Cassidy's crush. He's calm, collected, confident, and a skater boy. Definitely one of the "cool kids." Despite how cool he may seem on the outside, inside he still gets nervous and overthinks.

Set

The majority of the film takes place outside of a high school. The school set was modeled to be modular, allowing it to be rearranged on a shot by shot basis to have full control of the composition. Two versions of the school bricks were made, individually modeled bricks for use in the foreground and texture mapped bricks for the background. Handling the bricks in this way allowed for file and render optimization.