Doodley Lore Part 3: Baby no Diaper

Hi! This is the third in a series of “lore” posts that talk about some of the projects I've done in the past. Behind the scenes for things that aren't Doodley related, basically!

You can read the rest here, but you don't need to read either of them for context. This one is about one of the short films I did in college, during my Junior year (3rd year.)

We're skipping Senior year since it was almost entirely spent making Maplewood, which I've already talked at length about here. (Although I may do a separate retrospective or commentary on Maplewood soon.)

This one is about Baby no Diaper, which is one of the three films on the Youtube channel!

Baby no Diaper was originally my Animation IV assignment. Within my curriculum, we had four "general" animation classes that focused on producing various short films and small assignments. Most of these are simple and done in one or two weeks.

However, Animation IV was more about creating a single, complete film in one semester, or 5-ish months. You are not supposed to have it be any longer than a minute and 30 seconds. It's meant to represent a smaller form of your "thesis" year, where you do the same thing but spend two semesters (a year) on it.

To a specific person, this can either sound like a lot of time for a minute of animation, or a hellish nightmare of not enough time for something so massive. And honestly, it can be both! It just depends on the expectations your set for yourself, how ambitious you are, how you carefully manage your time.

This film was also where I first collaborated with Jayfoo!

Pre Production

I believe my original idea for this film was two moms fighting in a Dragon Ball Z style non-violent fight. I wanted them competing to do "mom things" without actually throwing punches.

But I realized that it was too similar to an existing episode of Dexter's Lab (probably where my subconscious was) and that the idea could potentially end up being a little sexist. (i.e. reducing women to just cleaning, cooking, etc.) I mostly just liked the idea of people doing extremely mundane, non-violent things, but with the bravado of a DBZ fight -- I didn't want to make fun of motherhood or anything like that, just joke about how difficult it can be.

That's how things lead to "mom vs. baby" instead. There was an extreme there that I found really funny, where the fight inherently couldn't be violent, but the tone and atmosphere was treated that way.

I don't have as much concept art/pre production for this film since a lot of it was made up along the way!

Production

At this point in college, I had only barely done anything 3D, and thought I was mainly going to be a storyboard artist. I had a habit of going hard on my animatics specifically because I wanted to include them in a story artist portfolio.

I'm still pretty proud of my animatic here -- there's a sense of volume to a lot of the drawings that I'm not always able to capture.

Shortly after completing the animatic was also when I first met Jayfoo. I reached out to him specifically because, outside of his excellent work scoring films, we both liked fighting games. It's odd, but I think that connection is important -- you want to be on the same wavelength as your composer, because you're a collaborator going back and forth on ideas.

When he delivered the first, early rendition of the score, I remember I was walking to work and listened to it on my way and being unbelievably happy and elated at how good it was.

Also, I completely forgot I did this, but there was a cut version of the ending that I only just found again while going through my files.

You can draw your own conclusions here, but I'm glad I went with the final version where he laughs with victory.

Animation

A lot of my animation at this time was done in very rough stick figure-like form, since I could do it very quickly and adjust the timing and spacing without having to redraw everything.

In 2D animation, this would be my favorite part. I just like figuring out the timing and movement of everything, without worrying about finishing it.

That said, it caused some issues later because my animation lacked a "tie-down" stage, and instead I went straight into inks. This worked in some places, particularly with the baby, but not as much others.

In particular, near the beginning and end there are some janky, sloppy drawings as I was running out of steam near the end of the film, and the posing and anatomy in those shots is pretty bad. You can see a comparison between the storyboard drawing done at the start of the film's production and the final animation drawing here, done at the end of production:

If you can imagine that this was one of the last shots I did, after 2+ months of straight inking and coloring, that's why it looks HELLA jank.

I have not really done any 2D animmation since this (outside of the tiny stuff that has appeared in Doodley videos), but I'd love to return to it someday with everything I've learned.

Coloring and VFX

Coloring was the part that sucked the most. I had to color thousands of frames, which just involved doing the same thing over and over. I animated the film in Photoshop, so coloring was basically done via Photoshop actions (select > expand > paint bucket, etc.) It took a little over a month and absolutely drained me. I probably won't do another 2D animated film solo again because of it.

But I did enjoy more of the VFX process, where I figured out how to make the film look good without too much extra effort. I didn't want it to be a stark colored drawing like the above, I wanted it to have a bit more oomph.

Part of the process was to export the lineart and the color fills separately, then layer them on top of each other in After Effects. This allows me to add different types of effects to each layer, such as adding a small shadow around the lines to give it a bit of depth.

Finalizing

I'm not totally sure how I ended up finishing this film on time. Aside from a few all-nighters, I was massively drained and hated working on it, even though I love the end result.

I think I didn't finish the intro, outro, backgrounds and some of the effects until the week before it was due. I remember people being flabbergasted that it was complete when I walked into class, because it was in a much simpler state the week before. It's possible finishing the coloring stage energized me to wrap it up.

Speaking of -- that's why the first 10 seconds of the film is so janky. I wanted it in a different style than the rest of the film, more of a brushy storybook style, but it ended up falling by the wayside (including it's animation) so I ended up doing it in a few days.

I kind of wish I just did a couple of really good paintings for the intro and faded between them, so there was a bigger shock when the slap happens at the beginning of the film. But I remembering being obsessed with the baby standing up like a human in very fluid animation, so I think I dismissed that idea. Oh well!

Why Does The Mom Look Like Gimberly?

Huh? Oh yeah. At least in some of my first storyboards (like above) she didn't really look that way.

I get this comment sometimes, and uh, yeah. Complete accident. But people are 100% right. I think it's a same-face syndrome in some of my work, where I have a safe and reliable way of drawing certain characters and faces that tends to crop up.

I've said before that I'm not really much of a character designer -- I struggle with coming up with unique designs that I feel good about. I didn't really have a specific design for the mom in this film, but I wanted to make sure she felt average. So it ended up being the kind of default face and design I come back to.

So as a result, Gimberly kind of looks the same, because that's how I draw a lot of faces by default. Whoops.

Anyways, that's about all I wanted to say about this film. I hope you found it interesting! I plan to do the same for a few other films, and I hope you look forward to it.