Goat Mouth

Goat Mouth

My graduate thesis film!

Synopsis

Goat Mouth is about Roy the doubles vendor’s plan to steal customers from his competition, a coconut vendor named Cokez across the street, through supernatural means. After the doubles vendor's plan backfires on him, the coconut vendor helps him out of the mess he makes for himself and the doubles vendor sees the error in his ways.

I wrote and directed the short as the visual component to my thesis about the effectiveness of using multimedia styles in animating Caribbean stories.

Apart from director I was also the defacto environment design lead as the thesis is about multimedia styles (and the setting, Trinidad, is where I grew up!). The environment was my canvas on which to prove my thesis statement- that mixed media styles are particularly effective in capturing Caribbean aesthetics in animated film.

The Caribbean is a region with rich history that makes it home to people of many backgrounds. We are vibrant because our cultures are built out of many different cultures which combine to be something unique. I set out to see how well this sort of pluralism pairs with multimedia styles for visual storytelling.

The characters were rigged and animated in 2D using Toon Boom Harmony and the effects animation was done with textured brushes in procreate dreams so special care was put on driving the style of the backgrounds towards a 2D feel as well.

(designs by character design lead Dominique Ebron)  

I took lots of pictures in my research of the environment and came up with a style frame that evoked a Trinidadian Landscape at a glance. I tried through the colours, mountains, ivy-covered power lines and an exposed sky below low town buildings- to give cues to anyone that knew and insight to anybody that didn't about where the story is set.

My style frame was made in a hybrid process where I blocked out things in Blender and painted over it in Photoshop. I Had already done a style test to see what 2D style I wanted to achieve. I painted a simple plein-air texture-driven painterly piece so I tried my best to transfer its visual essence over the cold geometry.

I found this to be really effective! Painterly and 2D driven to match the character animation very cozily in a nice multimedia base. My film has 83 scenes though and my next step was to think of a pipeline that could support that many scenes without needing a full paintover for each individual one. I had to push the 2d, painterly multimedia aesthetic as far as I could natively in blender so as to reduce the painting load in subsequent steps.

I played around with pbr textures in blender, then painted over them in photoshop and I then I projection mapped it back into the scene.

Once I blocked out my scene and plotted cameras for every shot, I detailed each shot as far as I could in blender, paying attention to pushing the multimedia style of each scene. 

This was great for the film's pipeline because this meant that backgrounds could easily be updated in tangent with the character animation, it was just a matter of moving a camera or object in the scene.

I also designed some 2D assets that would go to modelers and be placed in the scene

In order to push the multimedia feel further I took advantage of the fact that I was in Trinidad during some of the film's production and did some photogrammetry- pushing both the authenticity and textural variety of the environment.

Once I had my bases I took it all to photoshop

The last step I took before compositing is to take the already quite developed backgrounds and further pushing the style's multimedia feel. I applied painterly filters using adobe firefly ai in photoshop and selectively masked out the filter with some textured brushes, creating areas of textural difference. I added some more texture where needed with  painterly brushes made by Kyle Webster, then I moved the results to after effects where I started to composite everything.

I combined everything in compositing and landed on a great visual target. 

 I ended up with a Caribbean story with multimedia aesthetics that used visual conventions that specifically suited the setting and content of the story.