Breakfast

During the first COVID lockdown in 2020, I produced the short film Breakfast.

The process I followed was straight forward, though time consuming! I filmed a short piece in my kitchen, following a rough script.

After editing the footage into a coherent and simple story, I played around with frame rates. My goal was to get the frame rate as low as possible while still being watchable.

Then I exported every frame of the edit as a PNG file, and imported every PNG into Photoshop. I had one Photoshop project for each shot of the film, each containing a layer for each frame.

Then I went through and traced one frame for each shot. This allowed me to pick brushes and colours, and come up with an asthetic that I liked. I wanted something bright and colourful, the complete opposite of the dark kitchen I filmed in!

Then I repeated the tracing process for each frame, for the entire film. I started with the backgrounds first, then painstakingly traced each frame, one at a time. If it wasn’t for the lockdown, I’d never have finished it!

It’s the kind of film which could probably be made much faster with the help of AI now, but there’s something to be said for going the long way round, just to see.

Once animation was complete, I returned to my kitchen to record sound effects for each shot.

Overall, I’m very happy with the result.