The Red Leaf
The Red Leaf is a short animated adaptation of Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree that I worked on with Claire Cooke and Benn Belcher.
The visuals of Tan’s book are very powerful so we felt that the best way to adapt the film would be to make it a 2D and 3D animation hybrid, the 3D models and effects were done by Ben Belcher, Claire did the animation cleanup and we all worked together on the rough animation shots and the animation coloring.
This project was completed using Clip Studio Paint for the 2D animation and Blender for the 3D animation.
Animation Concepts
While planning out our the look of our animated short and storyboards I worked on some concept illustrations to help us figure out what shots we could include in the animations and how certain already decided on scenes could look.
Rough Animation
Claire and I collaborated on the leaf animations that I did together as she animated a leaf mock up in Maya so that we could have the leaf animations on a consistent and smooth path. After handing over the shots to me I was tasked with animation over the footage given to me and turning the leaf from 2D to 3D.
Animation Coloring
Like with the rough animation we all worked on the animation coloring to avoid burnout. The shots below are the ones that I colored for the final project.
Claire did the cleanup animation on our animation shots to keep the final look consistent and Benn created all of the 3D assets seen in the short.
Benn worked on the shots that were very 3D heavy and that needed to be finely integrated to be believable. Claire and I worked on the rest of the shots that didn’t have as many 3D assets to be worked around. I think that these shot turned out really well especially since this project was the first time that I did animation coloring for a group project and the first time that I used Clip Studio Paint.
