Case Study: Breakneck | Short Film
Breakneck is a short film about a guy named Finley, who isn’t going to let an empty fridge get in the way of his lunch.
Breakneck is a personal project of mine, which I pursued for two reasons:
I wanted to showcase my character animation skills
I wanted to develop a simple story completely from scratch
I’ve been kicking around a script called Breakneck for longer than I care to admit. After I’d nailed down a story, I realised it needed to be simpler and shorter, otherwise it would simply never get made.
Once I was happy with the script, I began storyboarding. When the storyboard was about one-third done, I nearly ditched the whole project. I was frustrated with how slow production was; I had very little time to work on it and had set myself a mammoth task creating so many assets from scratch.
I decided to simplify things again. I took all the storyboard panels I had finished and built a story based on those. There were two or three new frames required to bridge some gaps, but at last, I had something finished!
It was just a storyboard at that stage, but I was much happier; I knew I had a storyboard for a film I could conceivably finish this year, in-between client projects.
Am I happy with the result? Yes.
I feel this is a fair representation of my character animation ability. It was a lesson in trying to cram in a personal project between the demands of client work. I’ve wanted to do a project in this style for ages, so it gets it out of my system! Feedback from trusted friends and colleagues has been reasonably positive.
Are there things I’m not happy with? Also, yes.
I think shot continuity could be improved. I was relying too heavily the audience’s ability to fill in gaps between shots meaning it’s a little disjointed in places. Also, I believe the film would have been more refined by spending more time in pre-production, iterating using a hand-drawn animatic, rather than jumping straight into fully-designed style frames.
