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Chelita, Como Me Duele Quererte
Project Summary
"Chelita, Como Me Duele Quererte" is the senior capstone short film I directed during my final year at Savannah College of Art and Design. I was responsible for storyboarding the entire project, total to around five minutes when formatted as an animatic. The value boards above were part of the earliest draft of our pitch packet, later replaced by the boards which I hope to share on my storyboarding page soon! My contribution since completing the boards was mainly supervision of animation, drawovers, instruction of team members on the programs we used to create Chelita, and social media strategy. I also animated on around 25% of the shots seen in the final film. The project has been presented to various industry professionals from both TV animation and feature animation, and proceeded under their guidance as well as that of our professors. Together with my fellow director, we lead a team of roughly fifty people, and work with traditional dancers, musicians, and film experts to assure the film is as accurate to the beauty and history of Mexican culture as possible. I am honored to be part of the Cheliteam, and look forward to sharing more as the film makes its rounds at film festivals!
Early Development
In the early design stages, I consulted on animatability of the protagonists' (Chelita and Gilberto) designs, testing poses, expressions, and angles which were then submitted to my fellow director for peer review. The style frame was completed during this phase, alongside some additional background exploration before settling on a different style, included below. We went back and forth on the final look of the leading characters until we found the optimal balance of simplicity and appeal, then began teaching the rest of the team how to draw the characters to prepare for production. Many practice drawings were pulled directly from poses in the storyboard, and those who captured likenesses with the greatest success became the layout team, which I then assisted in supervising and distributing drawovers.
Creating Animator Resources
To assure that our team can draw the characters as accurately as possible, we and our leads have provided them with extensive visual guides on everything from line weight, to texture, to stylization of hands and feet; not to mention all of the guides just for animating the baile folklorico skirts. Below are a few samples of my contributions to these guides. Though I have a few pages in the style guide, my influence on the animation guide was heavier.
Posters
The fun part is always getting to create special bonus artwork for networking or promotional opportunities! Here are two posters I created for such events.
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