Making of "Small Step"

Making of Small Step

Today we are going to talk about how we managed to come up with the complete short “Small Step” . Dont expect this is gonna be grand one ( as simple as possible hehe )Well it is about pollution and a simple solution.

The concept

The concept was influenced from the reality picture of a present Kathmandu city. Every day the garbage and waste products gets dumped into the river running through valley. The river now runs real slow and black with odder. So we thought we can give message to people out there and especially to the children as they are the ones who would be the leaders one day. Making an exact mirror about the subject wouldn’t be exciting. So we came up with the characters that twined the whole subject into fantasy one which the children love. The garbage monster and the boy.

Backgrounds

The background images were created from the reference photograph of houses in Kathmandu.

Story board

Well after the concept was clear enough, we started story boarding. Actually it was supposed short of about 5-6 minutes. We had the shorts where the big war takes place between the monster and the army, people running all over the place, other extra shots and all. Later on we eliminated those scene coz we didn’t want the story line to go on and on which would be boring and very lengthy. So we put only the beautiful and clear shots.

Animation

For animation part we were thinking about doin it in 3d. We didn’t have a rigger and it would take a lot of time to model different set for different shots. Later on we started animating in flash. And that took pretty long time to get done with the animation. We tried to merge the anime style with the flexible cell style though it still looks stiff all over the places haha. we worked on and off for about 5 months and there it is with final rendered form.

Editing and sound

It was quick process for the final compile part. We worked for few days trying to create sounds. We recorded the footsteps, voice, monster’s sound, birds yap and all the effects. And for the music part we used a traditional soundtrack ( local artist) .

And once again the final short.

Team

Pranaya Shakya – Editing, sound and technical

Fursang Tamang – Jr. Artist

Deepak - Animator, artist

Surendra Prajapati – supporting artist

Thank you very much for reading.

bye