The Compass
3D Animated Short Film
A narrative short film about a father and son following a compass through a wasteland
This project was the final for my narrative cinema class. The class was live-action based but for this final project I decided I was done with live-action student films and wanted to shoot for something bigger. I had a couple years experience in blender with the basics and used this project as an excuse to make a full 3D animated short film.
I started by storyboarding out the story and making some test renders and character designs. My initial ideas for the story was that of a father and son exploring a post apocalyptic world and fighting a monster. The storyboards were very roughly drawn in my grid paper notebook.
I then used those as the base for some character tests.
I also took this time to develop the style and look. I needed to adapt to my skill level and time so I chose to use untextured, low poly models and moved from the slower raytracing rendering to the faster eevee rendering style.
I then started animating by prevising some of the first scenes, just moving the characters around by the hip like action figures. Later I came back and did some of the essential animation work, changed the ending and parts of the story I wasn't happy with, and rendered out an unshaded cut of the film. Here are some screenshots.
With that as a base, I added more animations, polished them as much as I could with the time given, added lighting and rendering effects, and added sound effects and music.
The animation ended up rougher than I had hoped and the story wasn't the strongest, but I'm still happy I put in the effort and came out with a final product I could be more proud of than just another live-action student film.
