Developing Digital Short Films

The film market is shifting toward traditional desktop technology to create productions...digitally. Unlike traditional film production, though, digital films require producers to employ a different pre-production process. Developing Digital Short Films explores how unique character and set designs, bluescreen ideas, special effects, and simple 2D character animation techniques can be used as narrative devices for telling stories. Part One focuses on generating visual ideas that are ideal for digital production and creating a short film script. Part Two focuses on the visual pre-production of a short film and the issues that go through a filmmaker's mind as they struggle with how best to present their stories; this includes topics like 101 camera shots, frame composition, developing a visual look and feel, color maps, and creating storyboards and animatics. Part Three explores the different production environments of DV, 2D and 3D, and how they shape the telling of stories based upon the technological strengths of each style.

The film market is shifting toward traditional desktop technology to create productions...digitally. Unlike traditional film production, though, digital films require producers to employ a different pre-production process. Developing Digital Short Films explores how unique character and set designs, bluescreen ideas, special effects, and simple 2D character animation techniques can be used as narrative devices for telling stories. Part One focuses on generating visual ideas that are ideal for digital production and creating a short film script. Part Two focuses on the visual pre-production of a short film and the issues that go through a filmmaker's mind as they struggle with how best to present their stories; this includes topics like 101 camera shots, frame composition, developing a visual look and feel, color maps, and creating storyboards and animatics. Part Three explores the different production environments of DV, 2D and 3D, and how they shape the telling of stories based upon the technological strengths of each style.

Sherri Sheridan is the Creative Director at Minds Eye Media (http://www.mindseyemedia.com) in San Francisco, where she spends her time creating all sorts of digital projects. Over the years she has directed, produced, animated, written, and designed projects for a wide range of clients, including Fortune 500 companies, major record labels, TV/cable stations, feature-film studios, advertising agencies, and video game companies. She is the co-author of Maya 2 Character Animation (New Riders, 1999).

Currently, Sherri is creating a series of international Developing Digital Short Films Workshops based on the ideas in this book. She is also writing, developing, and directing several original scripts for digitally enhanced shorts and feature films.

Over the years, Sherri has helped inspire thousands of graduate computer animation students from around the world, helping them to tell their own stories using their favorite digital tools, at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. While teaching these students, she started developing the foundation for a unique step-by-step digital visual storytelling process, which has grown into this wonderful book.

Before founding Minds Eye Media in 1995, she helped develop Shockwave Technology at Macromedia, and created the first Shockwave movies on the web. Sherri has a BA in English from U.C. Berkeley and went to San Francisco State to study interactive design and computer animation for her graduate work.