In Shapes
Blue Zoo Animation Studio
Role: Art Director | Year: 2020
I had the opportunity to collaborate with director Zoé Risser on her beautiful short film In Shapes for Blue Zoo’s short film program. As Art Director, I helped bring her vision to life by creating concept art, early character designs, colour keys, as well as supervising the design and modelling teams to ensure a cohesive and captivating visual style throughout the film.
Designing “In Shapes”
To stay within our production timeline, we adopted a minimalist approach to the character and environment design. This allowed us to prioritize storytelling while maintaining a strong, cohesive visual style across the film.
We worked remotely with artists from Blue Zoo, alongside the talented summer interns. Our goal was to explore the creative possibilities of combining 2D and 3D animation styles in a single cohesive story.
Character
By simplifying the secondary 3D characters to basic shapes, we were able to maintain focus on the main character and make both the design and animation processes more efficient.
The 2D versions of our main character represent her inner feelings of insecurity, and also show how she learns to overcome them.
Environment
Keeping to a minimalistic style, we designed the backgrounds with more detail and visual interest around the main character, gradually simplifying them into flat colors and clean shapes as they receded into the distance. This helps keep the focus where it matters while still creating a sense of depth and atmosphere.
Colours
To keep a clear sense of place throughout the short, we divided the story into three main locations: the changing room, the showers, and the pool. Each space was assigned its distinct color palette, helping to separate each moment and visually support the narrative flow.
