Cardiff Quick Draw!

Cardiff Quick Draw Poster - Illustrated by Tim Hawkins

Cardiff Animation Festival kicks off this week,  so we thought we would share our experience of one of the offshoot events, Cardiff Quick Draw.

36 Hours to script, storyboard, illustrate, animate & edit a short film, oh and do the sound design.

Sign us up! (like the fools we are)

The premise being to start on a Friday and wrap on a Sunday, with the aim to submit a finished film for a screening around 7pm.
Friday was kicked off with a live stream dedicated to announcing the theme; Launch.

It's broad yet narrow, and the initial panic of 'What the hell are we going to do with launch?' soon kicked in. But this is where the fun of this sort of event comes in, there's no time to over-think, better done than perfect.

Boards started to take shape Friday afternoon and the idea started to flesh itself out naturally. It's almost time for studio pizza and beers whilst digging in for a late one, then a crippling realisation takes place, we have lost/misplaced our main studio key… so we have to call it a day and leave early.

Progress- More beers drank than seconds on the timeline.

With a quick visit to the locksmith on the Saturday morning we are back in action, fresh keys and hopefully some keyframes. Saturday goes well, the boards are coming to life and it feels like our little film could turn out to be a nice little piece.

After a few key scenes are completed, we soon realise the style is quite time consuming both for Hannah (illustrator) and for myself and James to animate.

But it looks sweet if nothing else!

6pm hits and reluctantly it's time to shut up shop as we have a 30th birthday to attend, work/life balance and all that.

Progress- First scenes looking good

Sunday 6am, groggy from the previous night the main question was 'Damn, who's idea was this??' a hungover cycle to the studio happens and it's straight back in to
animation.

Sunday is a blur of keyframes, and pen strokes, frantically trying to complete what we set out to, but by mid afternoon we have to admit defeat and face the fact we are a few key scenes away from the film we had originally envisioned.

Test city and balloon rig

But after a few watches it kind of scrapes through, so sound design and music are added and it starts to feel so full, but yet so far from done.

Anyhow a deadline is a deadline, so we head over to submit and await the sceening at Gwdihw.

I won't spoil anything as the films are all being shown again at the kick off party for the festival but all the films are brilliant and crafted by some really talented people.

To wrap up, events like quick draw are easy to dismiss or be intimidated by, but in reality they are a great way to see what's possible, a reason to share something that isn't perfect, everything you hoped for, or in our case... finished. 

We might not have finished our short but we are already finishing up the missing scenes and look forward to sharing soon!

Finally a big thankyou to Tim and Mike for organsing the whole event, already looking forward to next year!

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As mentioned Cardiff Animation Festival kicks off in Kongs in town on Thursday, so pop along and lets have a beer.

Thursday 19 April 2018

8:00pm | Kongs, Cardiff

FREE