Heaven Spot (Short Film)
In 2024, I worked on a short hybrid drama with Create Studios in Swindon, featuring animated street art coming to life in a live action film. The film tells the story of street artist Jay as he deals with the grief of losing his brother in a car accident. As punishment for creating street art, Jay completes his community service by cleaning up street art around the town, but as he does, he sees the street art starting to come to life.
1) Animation Tests:
I was involved with the production from the start. As the lead animator on the project, I helped the director to pitch the film with early designs and animation tests and we won the short film funding.
One of the big aspects of the film was proving the living street art animation could blend into the real life settings. I worked on a variety of animation tests, exploring the techniques in After Effects to blend the animation realistically into live action footage and looking at how we could incorporate existing street art into the film.
2) Designs:
I designed different characters for the street art, aiming for a mix of styles and a range of complexity, to mirror the variety of street art you see in real life. We focused on a variety of animal designs, as well as different versions of the street art at the start of the film.
3) Animation:
Each animation is made through drawn animation in Toon Boom Harmony. I imported each shot into Toon Boom to make sure the animation matches the scale in the scene.
Once each animation is cleaned up and coloured, I used Adobe After Effects to composite each shot. I added a Blend Mode effect on the animation in each shot - the different layer effects allow the lighting of the scene and the texture of the wall to show through the animation, blending it into the scene more convincingly. Then I would duplicate the live action footage to create a new mask layer, and masked out anything that moves in front of the animation, so the animation is covered whenever something moves in front of it, again helping to make the animation look more realistic.
4) Final Film:
The final film was shown in multiple film festivals, and has since been uploaded to YouTube for online viewing.
Watch the short film here: