“No Man Is An Island” is a San Diego State University student film production. Five animators were commissioned to each create a 3-6 second animated segment of the film. The film features John Dunne, an ordinary man who was diagnosed with cancer, and follows the next 24 hours dealing with the thoughts and imaginations realizing his mortality. The film is produced as a live action sequence with his imaginations as mini animated sequences.
My segment, Office Zombies, was assigned to illustrate the scene where Dunne decides not to go to work, and imagines his office as an incredibly dull and dreary workspace run by zombies. My goal for this project was to illustrate the internal emotions of real people at work, represented by zombie figures. My research was inspired by the Walking Dead, the book How to Draw Chilling Monsters, Zombies, and Vampires, and a collective survey of my peers about their workspace habits and common frustrations. I combined these inspirations with our assistant director’s decisions for this particular scene, which were to create the animation in black and white, and for the setting to be in extremely disheveled office cubicles.
The challenges I faced during this project were working with traditional pen and paper. Without a digital drawing tablet or other animation resources, I resorted to experimenting with 2d digital animation software on my iPad in addition to the rugged pencil and pen sketches, which were scanned and colored in Adobe Photoshop, and layered in Adobe After Effects. Both methods worked well together and ran smoothly and efficiently. In addition, when making the figures in black and white that were layered on top of the background, the image looked flat and didn’t lead the viewer’s eyes to the characters, even with their large movements. To solve this problem, I used a dull color palette for the zombie characters to help them to pop off the page.
Combining spastic animated movements, grungy artistic techniques, and an unexpected setting, the segment can be therefore described as no less than morbidly comical.
Reference
Progression
Final
Zombie Office from Marleia Alfaro on Vimeo.