Time is a beast humans have wrestled with since, well, the dawn of time. There’s never enough of it. We’re always trying to outrun it and, fueled by nothing more than delusion, we’ll try anything to slow it down or freeze it altogether. But time always proves a more powerful force than human will. And few understand this concept more than college students on a deadline.
But for animation students at the Savannah College of Art and Design, one way to come to terms with time is to make it the centerpiece of an entertaining story. And that’s exactly what they did.
Animated short films Time Flies and Chelita, Como Me Duele Quererte (Chelita, How It Hurts to Love You) are two very different films – one about the comedic and tragic 24-hour lifespan of two houseflies and the other about female soldiers in the Mexican Revolution – and yet they’re bonded by the common theme of lost time. Time Flies will screen at SCAD Savannah Film Fest Thursday, October 31 and both Chelita and Time Flies will join the SCAD Animation Showcase, scheduled to screen Wednesday, November 6.
“We had a bunch of initial story concepts that didn’t stick, which was partially influenced by our own time limit,” says B.F.A. sequential art student LJ Burnett, who directed Time Flies. “But the theme of these two flies handling time very differently struck us. They don’t have much time. We don’t have much time. We could relate to what they were going though.”
As for Chelita, director and creator Luis Gerardo Ponce Piñon, a recent graduate with his B.F.A. in animation shares, “My great-grandmother lived through the revolution and people would just get taken as a form of recruitment. Women and children were actually hidden in barrels to keep them from being taken and turned into soldiers, or adelitas. This story was inspired by her stories of that time. I also wanted to capture the essence of Cine do Oro, the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema and replicate different styles from the 40s and 50s.”
Chelita’s 2D visuals – produced in black and white hues with old camera dust flickers and vintage lens quality – spotlight the lost years of the classic films Gerardo Ponce Piñon grew up watching as a child while telling the story of a young baker whose childhood crush returns to town as a hardened adelita. The baker makes up for lost time by trying to win back her heart through many romantic gestures. The story gained inspiration from not only Gerardo Ponce Piñon’s family history, but also the family movie night log, from Enamorada to Maria Candelaria.
“Luis and I also had the privilege of visiting local dance troupe Alma Mexicana here in Atlanta to study the Baile folklórico dancers as they did their rehearsal and learned how to draw their movements and their skirts,” says Riley Quinn another B.F.A. in animation graduate from SCAD who served as director alongside Gerardo Ponce Piñon on the film. “I think finding a way to convey something like that, which is so intricate, so culturally significant, and so ornate and elegant in limited pencil lines and limited time was one of the greatest challenges on the film.”
There’s a sequence in Chelita with roughly 67 characters on a dance floor and Quinn drew them all. Then there’s Time Flies, which has two characters at most in one scene – and not much more than that in the film – but plenty of forest foliage.
Head of character animation at DNEG Animation Ted Ty, who gave guidance on Chelita’s production, notes, “I saw a very early version of their film and found it really fun, but equally very ambitious. The team was so open in our chats on how to get the most of their ideas and maximize clarity and entertainment. Riley and Luis are both clearly so talented. I’m sure it will be a big hit if they decide to put it onto the festival circuit.”
While Chelita expresses the colorful culture of Mexico without a drop of color, Time Flies contains all the colors of the rainbow and then some. The film contains the full palette of summer pigments and gives a much more 3D visual effect than Chelita.
“Mount Rainier National Park in Washington was a basis for the features in our film’s environment,” notes Burnett. “We were able to look at the plants in that setting and create these designs for foliage and natural features that would be in our film. Our 3D artists were able to reference that concept art to create a stylized greenery that perfectly matched their 2D counterparts. We also used a lot of lighting to express the mood of each scene and a color script to help remind viewers of the houseflies’ limited time as they day goes from dawn to dusk. By the end of week six, we locked our animatic, designed most of the key visuals for our story and created plenty of 3D props.”
Supervising producer Morgan Eng, who graduated from SCAD this year with her M.F.A. in sequential art, added, “We had to complete this in 30 weeks, which is the shortest production for a SCAD Animation Studio student film. We started out as a team of 20 and quickly grew to 70 by the end of production, with a total of 10 production leads.”
SCAD students created these two shorts about two different relationships with time in two very different animation styles. But they have something in common outside of story concept: Pantheon.
Pantheon: Volumetric Lighting for 2D Animation was developed by SCAD alum Noah Catan for the SCAD Animation Studio film, The Pope’s Dog. The toolset, operated in Nuke, is meant to enable 3D lighting effects on 2D animation and was most recently used on Sony Pictures’ film adaptation of Harold and the Purple Crayon.
For the Time Flies crew, using Pantheon was part of their project’s prompt and was invaluable in bringing a tangible feel to the leaves, flowers and brush that saturates their film. It’s also what influenced the rounded style of the housefly characters and their forest home.
“We knew from SCAD’s previous experience with Pantheon on The Pope’s Dog that complex shapes and hard edges and miniscule details were going to make it more difficult to light our characters,” explains Burnett. “Knowing this, we gravitated toward character designs with simpler, smooth shapes.”
Then there came the task of blending the Pantheon-treated characters with the 2D background paintings and 3D assets that made up the smorgasbord of Time Flies’ visuals.
“We used Nuke for a lot of our compositing,” shares Davis Hardy, VFX co-supervisor and B.F.A. visual effects student at SCAD. “We also added effects elements like steam to add more depth and atmosphere and further emphasized the small scale feeling of our bugs’ world by adding chromatic aberration and a little blurring on the edge of the image, so it looked like you were peering into this world through a magnifying glass.”
But in Chelita’s production, using Pantheon to make characters look 3D-lit wasn’t the goal. In fact, the team wanted to maintain their hard-edge 2D animation, but make it look like it was filmed with almost a polaroid lens.
“One of the things that was very important to Luis was that we would have light leaks around the edges of characters, even if they weren’t necessarily backlit, because, in the 40s, when they were shooting animation, a lot of times they were shooting on a table with an overhead camera and the cells may or may not have been backlit at that point, says Neko Pilarcik-Tellez, an M.F.A. in animation student who served as the compositing lead on Chelita. “So, having that little bit of light leak, having the little bit of haziness to really give that rich, warm feeling of black and white silver screen cinema was really important and something I had to step up my game to achieve.”
Pilarcik-Tellez actually worked with Catan on The Pope’s Dog as well as Harold and the Purple Crayon. Being trained by Catan in Pantheon made Pilarcik-Tellez fall in love with compositing and caused her to pursue a career in it. Creating these light leaks without making their 2D characters straddle the 3D line was a difficult one and, in the end, a big part was having a good eye for light and shadow, especially since there was no colorscript and the crew was working entirely in shades of white and black.
“I’m hoping that I can help test new ways to use Pantheon and design features to make it even better and stronger,” says Pilarcik-Tellez.
Hardy, having also worked with Catan on a number of occasions during their time at school together, hopes that Time Flies and Chelita inspire creatives in SCAD and outside the university to use Pantheon to tell their own stories and discover ways to be innovative with the software.
“We’ve been working on a public release for a while,” says Hardy. “One of the original pitches for The Pope’s Dog was creating a sci-fi alien themed story. Something on the darker side.”
Chair of Animation at SCAD John Webber, and Time Flies’ project supervisor, added, “That’s what we’re doing next.”
Tickets for the SCAD Animation Showcase Screening can be purchased here: https://www.scadshow.com/events/double-feature-memoirs-snail-scad-animation-showcase-2024-11-06
See below for the full list of films:
Time Flies
- LJ Burnett (B.F.A. sequential art), director
- Morgan Eng (M.F.A., sequential art, 2024), supervising producer
- Davis Hardy (B.F.A. visual effects), VFX co-supervisor
- Ashley Hayden (B.F.A. animation), animation co-director
Chelita, Como Me Duele Quererte
- Luis Gerardo Ponce Piñon (B.F.A., animation, 2024), director and creator
- Neko Pilarcik-Tellez (M.F.A. animation), compositing lead
- Riley Quinn (B.F.A., animation, 2024), director
- Angela Mauvezin-Quiroga (B.F.A. animation), production manager
Have You Eaten?
- Creator/Director: Pavida (Patty) Changkaew (B.F.A., animation, 2023)
Dahlia
- Director/Producer: Martha Sanchez M. Morelia
Kitty
- Director: Isabella Holzberger
Menheim Clinic
- Director: Jacob Pappo (BFA animation) & Diana Grant
Persimmon Red
- Director: Alice Jiwon Yoon & Tam “Tammy” Le
Skater Girl
- Director: Dakota Liam Drake
Above the Clouds
- Director: Alani Sanders
Animus
- Director: Goh Kai Wen & Christina Tjahjadi
Cliff & Fishes
- Director: Robin Sloan
Harbor
- Director: Sam Jackson
Le Charade
- Director/Writer/Producer: Erika Totoro
Nainai’s Recipe
- Director: Daya Lee
Overcast
- Director: Amy Cheng
Pretty Kitty
- Director: Unnamed
Teaser Trailer
- Director: JJ Gibson
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She’s reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
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