Process notes · Graduate film, 2024

The Elevator

How the film was drawn, painted and put together.

The Elevator was completed in 2024, at the end of my third year at university. Lots of people helped out with it: we had a core team, and then lots of other students who made small contributions to help push it over the line.

A large grey fish carrying a wingback chair, an old television, bags and bedrolls, lit by a huge glowing orange lampshade with a star-shaped filament

The Fish Rider’s vessel

Animation

The film is entirely 2D hand-drawn animation, made in Harmony. We completed all the rough animation first, then moved on to clean-up. We didn’t have time to do a tie-down pass for most shots (a tie-down is a refinement of the rough phase, where more focus is placed on continuity between forms and more specific arcs of movement), so we tried to stay mindful of these things during clean-up.

I think the animation suffered a bit because of this, but for this project, where the emphasis is more on the environments, it made sense, and it was necessary in order to hit our deadline.

Clean-up animation for the Fish Rider and his cat

Backgrounds

The backgrounds took a more unconventional approach, and each one had a slightly different process. They are all painted by hand in watercolour and mostly refined with colour pencil, though the layouts were often drawn digitally in Photoshop first.

I started each one with a rough, annotated sketch. The writing helps me start thinking about the different details that could be in the image. It was important that the images felt as conceptually dense as possible, and that they helped to give more information about the world and its logic. This sketching and annotation was preceded by lots of research during pre-production.

Pencil sketch of a winged figure sitting by an arched doorway that opens onto a beach, with notes reading blue sky, clouds and shore

Digital line layout of a dense forest with a fallen trunk, flowers in the foreground and pale light through the trees, blocked in with grey tones

Forest layout, the doorway onto the shore, and a sketchbook page of thumbnails

Rough digital sketch of a giant willow tree on a floating mound, covered in handwritten notes in black and red about stars, doors, an organ and portals

Finished digital line drawing of the willow tree, with doors, stairs and rooms hidden among the hanging branches and long roots trailing below

The willow tree, from annotated rough to final layout

Where we used digital layouts, we had them printed onto A3 card and painted them with watercolour washes.

Fish Rider

Treelevator

Painting backgrounds in watercolour, one-minute timelapses

Close-up of a painted tree trunk, built up in brown, violet and blue colour pencil over a watercolour wash

A cumulus cloud painted in blue-grey watercolour and worked over with blue and white colour pencil

Inked purple flowers and pale green leaves painted in watercolour and colour pencil

Details from the scanned backgrounds: watercolour washes refined with colour pencil

Parallax

The last step was adding parallax to the backgrounds. This is where you position different parts of the image at different depths, so that when the camera moves, the background feels like a 3D space, with each part of it moving past the camera at a different speed.

To do this, we scanned the painted backgrounds back in and brought them into Photoshop, where we cut them into separate images based on how far from the camera they should be. Then we arranged these image planes in Blender, pushing them back or bringing them forward to build a multiplane environment. To enhance the effect, we often cut, folded and distorted the planes in Blender. It felt like just by using the planes and some basic modelling, we could get the effect we wanted.

If you're interested, I have a few of these backgrounds available as prints on INPRNT

Forest and glowing door

The giant’s landscape

Painted planes arranged in Blender to build the multiplane scenes

Compositing and sound

The 2D animation was composited in After Effects. Some shots involved more complicated effects and tweaking, while others were just a matter of combining the animation with the background, adjusting the colours, and multiplying a paper texture over the animation to help integrate it. Once the scenes were ready, we brought everything together in Premiere Pro and added the sound and music by Ryan Yoshikami.

Concept

I had been thinking about this idea for a while before starting pre-production, and I knew from the beginning that it would sit somewhere at the junction between animation, worldbuilding and illustration. The character is a device to bring the viewer through a series of atmospheric environments. For me, the goal was to create a world with some magical quality, and a logic that made sense despite how bizarre the film is.

A biplane flying through pink clouds past a towering giant wearing a castle crown, with dark trees in the foreground

A boy at a night window looking through a brass telescope at a large aircraft among the stars

A boy with a satchel wading through dense undergrowth in a dark blue-green forest

A crashed aircraft fuselage tangled in dark red trees, with a small yellow plane caught in the branches above

A figure hanging from a maroon parachute against a starry blue sky

Colour frames from development, following the character through the film’s environments

Achieving this relies fundamentally on intuition, which works like a compass. Trying to understand the mechanism behind that compass always feels like a separate task to the act of creation for me. I certainly thought a lot about what the film was trying to express on a deeper level while making it, but fundamentally those are guesses, and I don’t believe they should add to or take away from the film as it is.

I hope you like it.