ANIMATION_Drain | haku draws

is a short 2D/3D hybrid project I made with two other teammates at university. All textures are hand drawn and all models were modelled explicitly for this project. Join our little acorn on its journey towards life.

My tasks in this project were the creation of all textures, concept art, storyboarding, modelling and sculpting the assets for the movie and designing and animating the title. The concept art, storyboard, as well as the textures were mainly made in Procreate and Photoshop. The assets were created in Maya and ZBrush.

story

We accompany a little acorn on its journey towards life; It falls from the big oak tree, travels through branches and leaves and finally lands on a beautiful spot beneath the sun rays. Suddenly, it starts to rain, supposedly gifting the acorn seedling life-giving water.

However, it turns out that it is raining acid rain, killing the plants around the seedling and finally, also the little acorn seedling. The message behind this short animation is, that the man-made industry and the toxic fumes it produces is killing nature at its core, even before plants have the chance to grow.

concept phase

We began by looking for a message we wanted to transmit. We were a team of three and what connected all three of us was a connection to nature. So, we soon had a topic we all stood for. Next step was to find moods in lighting and a color palette. Soon after we had decided upon our visual look, we started with concept art and storyboarding.

animatic

production

After our animatic was done, we started with the production of the animation; I started by modelling and sculpting different assets for the scene and by painting different textures which were then applied to the assets and planes with an alpha map to create foliage.