Directed by Mikailah Tersavich, Kush Boradia and Alejandra Toyos
Young Nandini is exploring outside of her village with her trusty Slingshot, shooting mango after mango down from the tree. I wasn’t until she noticed Nandu, a poor village boy, who was trying to get a mango himself to eat. After showing Nandu the ropes of how to slingshot, they soon realize that Nandu does not have good aim. It wasn’t until a thunderstorm hits, mortifying the young girl, that he tries to give it one more shot.
SLINGSHOT- 3D animated short film
Produced at SCAD Atlanta, 2023.
MY ROLES:
Production Manager through the whole 11 months of production. Later considered the producer because of my close work with the directors.
Animator: Animated three shots (blocking-final polish), helped supervise animation and fix any animations that had to be cleaned up by the end of production.
Since this was made by a very small team of students, I also helped multiple areas during production like: storyboarding, compositing and cloth simulation.
Pre-Production:
My roles: production manager and backup storyboarding artist.
During the pre-production stage, we worked with story artists, charcater designers, environment designers and the lead team, to create a story that was fun and entertaining, as well as heart warming.
The original story was pitched by director and animation lead, Kush Boradia. Then with the help of our story team, we fleshed out a rough animatic to plan the look and shot sequence for the film.
Designs by Grace Martin
STORY BY: Kush Boradia
CHARACTER DESIGN: Grace Martin
STORYBOARDING LEADS: Kush Boradia, Grace Martin
STORYBOARDING TEAM: Kush Boradia, Grace Martin, Clare Gautreaux, Mikailah Tersavich, Alejandra Toyos.
COLOR SCRIPTS: Mikailah Tersavich, Sonjun Cho
AE COMPOSITING: Alejandra Toyos.
Production:
As the production manager, I had to work with all the artists on the pipeline, modellers, visual develpment artists, and animators, to bring this all together. My goal is to forsee and plan ahead to avoid stepbacks as we move along the pipeline. With a 30 week span for completion, we decided to use a parallel pipeline working on multiple stages at once. We are speeding up the process of rendering by using Unreal Engine 5 instead of Maya Arnold rendering, always keeping in mind the most efficient way we can work with both Autodesk Maya and Unreal to make the transition smoothly.
Modelers: Katie Owens, Hung Ngugen, Kaitlyn McGrady.
Rigging Artists: Mangat Singh, Hung Ngugen, Valentino Forcellini,
Texture Artists: Tam Le, Kaiya Lee
UE Artists: Kush Boradia, Xueting Li, Katie Owens, Tushar Soni, William Wang
Lighting Artists: Xueting Li, Katie Owens
Animation Supervisors: Mikailah Tersavich, Kush Boradia
Animators: Kush Boradia, Mikailah Tersavich, Alejandra Toyos, Maddie Weathers, Dakota Liam Drake, Drew Creger, Cameron Carr, Mary Linden, Clare Gautreaux, Dani Dock, Michelle Wanjohi, Logan Magaw, Sarah Oyerinde, Megan Baker, Kaitlyn McGrady
Character and environment modeling, rigging and texturing. Animation from layout to final polish. My roles: Production Manager, character animator and compositor.
Animation by Alejandra Toyos
Post- Production:
The final stretch. During post production, the team worked really hard to transfer all animations and assets into Unreal Engine 5, where we light, composite and render. A very long way we came, and a great film came out of this.
