Short Film

This is a short story set in Sierra Leone, West Africa. A starving warthog eyes a large house, and attempts to sneak in and find something to eat. My family are native to Sierra Leone so I felt it'd be a nice chage of pace to set the story in a unique location like that. I used to visit a lot a kid and even based the design of the house on my grandmother's house. As well as tell a purely visual story featuring little to no dialogue, as well as my favourite west african dish, PLANTAIN. This page shows my visual development and key elements throughout production, including storyboarding, early animation tests and initial character designs.

PLANTAIN - Poster

PLANTAIN - TEASER

Teaser for the finished short.

Coming June 10th 2020.

DEVLOPMENT OF PLANTAIN

ACT 3 - SHOT 33

Music by AFRO NATIONAL - KING JIMMY

DEVLOPMENT OF PLANTAIN

ACT 1 SHOT 6

MUSIC provided by John Bartmann

DEVELOPMENT OF PLANTAIN

ACT 2 SHOT 3

MUSIC provided by John Bartmann

Storyboards

Below are the early storyboard drafts I developed. I jumped straight into it as soon as I had the initial story down. I didnt't have any finalised designs this early in the process yet so the setting and characters are rough looking and not very tidy. But they hit the mainn beats and many of these individual panels I would build a scene to match it as closely as possible.

EARLY SET DESIGN DRAFTS

Looking at old photos of my Grandmother's house, I based the setting and the surrounding plantlife around those old photos. I developed a seires of very raw drafts and would later heavily edit them in Adobe Photoshop.

EARLY DESIGNS OF THE WOMAN

Whenever I visited Sierra Leone it was at my Grandmother's house. And while initially I was going to base the design of the Woman on her, I decided upon something else. Growing up, I went to a lot of house parties and family gatherings. I always had a lot of aunts who were always at their happiest when their family and friends were enjoying the food she'd cooked. Often times it was various west african delicacies such as fried plantain, jollof rice and plasas to name a few.

Because of this, I felt for a bubbly character such as this should resemble anumber of those aunts of mine. So I had in mind a broad looking chubby woman with traditional west african attire. As well as a headscarf around her head and jewellery.

DRAFT#1 - WOMAN

DRAFT#2 - WOMAN

DRAFT#3 - WOMAN

DRAFT#2 - MOOD BOARD OF WOMAN

EARLY DESIGNS OF THE WARTHOG

Early on in production of the short I knew I wanted to feature an animal native of West Africa. I'd considered monkeys, rats even deer at one point. But I chose a warthog specifiaclly because it was an unusual choice for a main character. Soo afer deciding upon that, I began drafting early designs of the creature after looking at some online references of the animal.

DRAFT#1 - WARTHOG

DRAFT#2 - WARTHOG

DRAFT#3 - WARTHOG

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