A True Storey

A Creative Manifesto

A satirical film that celebrates the process of creative work through characters that represent distinctive parts of a typical animation production.

Although our perspectives are largely based on our own experience, we understand through conversations with creatives globally that these difficulties are universal. Fortunately, the solution appears to be universal too – we see our clients as creative partners, and that it’s our shared responsibility for a creative output that speaks to their customers.

Fellow creatives like yourself should resonate with this short film, so please share this film with your friends who enjoy a positive take on creative work!

Wallpapers & Video Thumbnails

Here are some vibrant visuals you can use as wallpapers for your desktop. We made them as video thumbnails for YouTube, and we figured that they appear to be most effective when we choose a point of contention in the story, that reads easily, and will pique the viewer’s interest.

Another note on video thumbnails – A main character with a strong emotion, fairly large in the frame, increase the chances of catching viewers attention.

Meet the Characters

We designed our characters based on the main functions on a typical 3D Animation team. It includes a Motion Designer, Character Animator, 3D Modeler, Texture/Surfacing Artist, Lighting and Rendering Artist, Visual Effects Artist, an Editor and last but not least, a Producer.

Can you guess their roles through their design?

Story Development

Before paneling the actions in a storyboard/animatic, we go through a quicker and messier process of thumbnails – a sequence of tiny drawings of the film, as a visual representation of each plot point of the story.

It’s a crucial process because it allows us to quickly test if ideas visually work. Especially in a non-dialog animated short film like this.

Yes, we have a voice-over, but as you may have figured, the voice script is satirically contrary to the happenings on-screen.

A thumbnail sheet (above) serves as an early indication of potential shot framing, number of shots, characters, props, types of acting choices etc. Movements and expressions will usually be suggested with arrows and quick supporting drawings at the side.

These will be refined when we work on the actual storyboards, where we draw minimally an A-B action to indicate the character’s action or thought process.

Character Design

An early character line-up for our film. We loved all the designs, but we made tough decisions to only keep the characters that are essential to the story, which primarily involves only the Team, and the Client.

We dramatized the size of the client hand to make it seem over-bearing, but its volume is equal to the Creative Team as a whole. Metaphorically, it’s aligned to our creative manifesto that Creatives and Clients should see each other as equals for a healthy working relationship.

We designed our characters based on the main functions on a typical 3D Animation Production. Guess our inspiration for our Editor!

Lookdev

Our goal was to give our characters a clay animation (claymation) look and extend it to the whole set. The hand-modeled nature of clay stop-motion brings us back to our imaginative childhood and highlights the handmade nature of our craft.

We maintained the traditional scale of a clay stop-motion world, using cotton balls for dust clouds, and building construction cranes with ice-cream sticks, to preserve the authentic look and feel.

If you’ve made it this far, you understand the hard work, passion, and commitment that goes into creating a short film. Keep pushing, fellow creative!

Character Rigging

Our characters are unconventional in that some of them are neither bipedal, nor do they have naturalistic facial features; we got creative with character rigging. For instance, we used the IK/FK arm auto-rig solution for the brush’s face!

Festive Visuals

We released the short film towards the end of 2022, and hence we prepared Christmas, New Year’s and Chinese New Year greeting visuals to market our film.

Countdown Visuals

“3, 2, 1….” Film production and distribution companies spend an equal amount of resources to both making and marketing a film. It’s a common pitfall for small animation and production companies to not market their film, or market it as an after thought. We seek to avoid this by taking active steps generating hype on our socials.

We believe in this universal message for fellow creatives and clients out there, so we are still working to ensure this film reaches as many as possible!

First Step into GIPHY

Within our studio, we enjoy the adorable reactions of our characters in the film. To the extend of wanting to use them on our social media posts. *Eureka sound effect*

We researched on how to earn creator access to get our GIFs & Stickers into GIPHY‘s search, and extracted sticker-worthy reaction animated GIFs from our film. So now, we can have fun with them in TikTok, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Stories, Snapchat, Whatsapp and more!

If wish to choose from a whole catalog of our gifs in your social platform, you can search for @masonrystudios (with the @ symbol)

Director’s message

“Creative struggles are universal, so are their solutions. I hope this film offers some level of solace and inspiration for all hardworking fellow creatives out there.

Know your worth, stay frosty, and keep pushing!”

Credits

Brought to you by Masonry Studios

Executive Creative Producer: Zulkifli Md Zaid
Concept: Masonry Studios Brainstorm
Director: Ronald Fong
Story Artist, Lead Animator: Ching Gje Chew
Art Director: Gina See
3D Modelling: Roy Yeo
Visual Effects & Lookdev: Roy Yeo, Jinsheng Yip, Gina See
Title Design & Motion Designer: Deemei Ong, Qianling Loy
Animators: Gina See, Qianling Loy, Roy Yeo, Jovan Ong, Benjamin Lim, Jinsheng Yip, Rachel Chew, Giselle
Voice-over Artist: Nicholas Chia
Sound Design: Nicholas Chia

Additional Ideation: Rex, Irfan
Additional Modelling: Linyu Chen
Marketing Copywriter: Ronald Fong, Zulkifli Md Zaid
Marketing Visuals: Karhin Low, Chunyu Tan, Qianling Loy, Deemei Ong

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