Honey Heist

"Honey Heist" is an film that went from conception to completion in 10 weeks; everything you see is done by me! Music by Kevin McLeod. This was completed at the end of my sophomore year.

For "Honey Heist", I knew I wanted to do something fun, and high-energy. But I was kind of banging my head for awhile; I didn't have much for concrete ideas. It wasn't until watching some classic black and white cartoons in a History of Animation class that I found a solid idea: let's just make it a chase scene. So often the cartoons were about Bluto chasing Popeye, or Mickey chasing Minnie, but despite being a seemingly thin narrative I still enjoyed the cartoon. So I went for it. In retrospect, I think I could've owned the idea of "high-octane goofy chase" a little more, but for my second short animation ever, I think I did okay.

As far as animation goes, I was excited to animate the caterpillar, who was basically a chubby noodle. He was pretty fun to work on! And I think he contrasted the more-limbed ant.

I'm mostly happy with the character designs, except for the "beetle car". Frankly it was just under-designed; I didn't give it the same attention other characters did, and it suffered. I think, in some shots, its not very clear what it even is.

Mock-up for the backgrounds

On to backgrounds! As far as doing something interesting, I was proud of the backgrounds, compared to the character animation done in the style of "default brush" (although I thought overlaying the rough animation in some shots added a cool layer to it). I created the 3 "textures" above (sky, grass, wood) out of some google search results, and crafted some 3D paper-cut-out environments in After Effects that the characters can zoom around in. The idea was to make something Eric Carle-esque. Mine was kind of a goofy, immature cartoon, and I thought of children books for aesthetics. Plus, I'm a fan of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and hey, this film has a caterpillar too!

I created a mock-up early on to see how this looks (it's not made with the above textures, this was an earlier idea)

I was excited to use weird things for the textures. For example, in the above mock-up, the beehive is made out of a macro image of cornbread, and in my final textures I put "ocean" pictures in the blue sky and clean cut wood planks in the bark texture.

Lastly, here's a draft of an animatic to close out this post: