Atticus Chave - 2D Animation & Storyboarding

Demo Reel

Angels in America

For a storyboarding excercise, I chose to adapt a scene from Tony Kushner's 1991 play "Angels In America Part One: Millenium Approaches" for the screen. In this sequence, we see the characters Prior Walter, a gay man recently diagnosed with HIV, and Harper Pitt, an agoraphobic mormon woman with a pill addiction, have a conversation in a dream-like space.

When designing these characters, I took some inspiration from previous adaptations - but ultimately came to a more toned down look, especially for Prior. He wears a decadent robe with makeup as he sees this as a dream, whereas harper is disheveled & in her natural state, seeing the events as a hallucination

I began the process by finding the key beats of the scene & ideating shot composition. I wanted to use a lot of wide open compositions to really feel a sense of eerie emptiness.

The final board is only a one half of the full scene due to time constraints, wiht some dialogue cut also due to the length of the scene.

Antereater Barista

Character design process for a moody late-teens anteater barista. The main focus of this task was to create a turnaround, walk cycle and other supplementary animation. I began with a rough expression sheet to get the feel of the character. 

Expression Sheet

Turnaround process 

Walk Cycle

For the walk cycle I worked in Toon Boom Harmony to create an exhausted and apathetic walk. Here's a video of my process.

Expression Change

Whilst this didn't go past the rough stages, I also made a short change of expression animation to really sell the character.

Hammer Down

My final project here, the development of a character for my in progress short film "Hammer Down" - The story of a child in the 1980s Australian outback who uses a CB radio to talk to truckers passing by. 

The main character is a scrappy & energetic tomboy who wants nothing more than to explore the world outside her home, so I made sure to capture that energy in her design.

Initial sketches

Played with a variety of child designs using 80's childrens clothes and haircuts as reference.

From there I picked 3 that worked best and ran them by my peers. The clothes and hair of C were the most effective, but the pose of A had more energy, so I combined the two and experimented with colour palettes.

Expression Sheet

With this, I wanted the focus to be on her interacting with her radio since it's a key element to the story. 

Turnaround

I created a turnaround for this character specifically adapting it for animation later down the line.