#20 Last Study: Swelter and This Actually Happens A Lot

I decided to add one more animation to study. This week would be pretty boring if I only had one animation to cover, so I remembered that there was another one which I reaally liked. I don't know why I had forgotten about it, but seriously, it's one of my favorite short animations. Like with last year's Gobelin's animation, I noticed that I developed another pattern with these studies: I'm mostly just studying the student animations from CalArts. I guess I have a thing for student-made stuff.
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Here's some stuff:

-Swelter by Jacob Streilein

Summary: In an apocalyptic setting, a man hand his child have to survive through a simple mission of getting water.

I think this is one of the first films I'm studying that has a buttload of grain. In my opinion, it helps the film, because it makes it look even hotter than if it just had the colors and no grain.

So in terms of artwork, this film doesn't have a lot going for it. The shapes for the characters are really simple and geometric. Where this film excels, though, is in the colors and atmosphere. The only colors used here were basically orange and yellow (until the last scene where they're hiding from the sun, giving reason to add some blue shadows). The sun was completely white, indicating it was burning hot. What I need to focus on when I create my own rendition of this is gradients, blooms, and grain. Those three things I think added a lot to the feel of the film.

I just realized that there was also some green tint in some places. Weird, no? I wonder what the thought process was behind that. Maybe to make everything look a bit more dirty.

This film was also made by the guy that made 'There's a man in the Woods', but this was made before that. The improvement in Streilein's art show all throughout Man in the Woods.
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-This Actually Happens A Lot by Tom Law 

Summary: A woman talks to a guy that's having trouble dealing with the awkwardness of being social with other people.

Some time ago, I said that this was one of my favorite short animations. I have not changed my mind. It's very weird, and maybe forced in some places, but it feels very honest and real to me. I feel like I was given a chance to peek into Law's life. The weirder thing is that the art is very simple. There is almost no background, yet with music and background knowledge, we can tell specifically where we are at any time.

The background color is usually one tone at any time (except for the color of the lines used with it), so the only thing that I can focus on and learn from is the character design. The thing is, I don't think I'll ever achieve a look like this. The lines are extremely expressive, it almost hurts. I don't feel like I could recreate it, but I'll still try.

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My version of:

-Swelter

Only being able to make one drawing of the style is not enough to completely understand how to copy it, but it is enough to better appreciate the direction the artist took.

I don't think I included enough orange tones in this. It lost some of the warmth I wanted to show, but the white added the feeling of a powerful light source coming from the right side of the drawing.

-This Actually Happens A Lot

I noticed while making this drawing that each person's clothes in the short used a complimentary color palette. Another reason as to why the film looked so appealing. And don't ask me why I chose to draw this drawing the way it is. I came up with the idea while watching the short for the tenth time. Deal with it.  Another thing is that I should've made the line thickness have more variety in some places. I told you I wouldn't be able to nail the design accurately. It just feels wrong trying to copy the style you love piece for piece. It's intimidating.