The PAVE project is a training program for student veterans returning to civilian life in an academic setting. The program aims to train student mentors to help these returning student integrate into civilian life again.
The mentor training program consists of 7 training videos. I was responsible for the storyboarding, recording, animation, and post production of all of them.
Process
We started with extension discussions about the population. The first ideas were aimed at younger 20-something males and females. So we all agreed that adopting a quirky and fun tone would resonate here. We could be serious when we needed to — but why not have a sequence with a werewolf? (more on that later)
Storyboarding -> Toon boom -> Motion -> FCPX
The first step was rapidly storyboarding. I used Toon Boom Storyboard for this — a really useful tool for the task. We of of brainstormed visuals together: two or three members of the PAVE team, with me furiously scribbling drawings. We came up with a “werewolf / silver bullet” sequence, which highlights how much fun this process was for all of us. The resulting animations received a lot of positive feedback on the subject matter and sense of humor.
Rough Animations and rigging were done in Toon Boom Studio. Thankfully there was no lip-syncing necessary here (that was by design, really) These character rigs were output as png sequences which were then pulled into Apple Motion for compositing.
Lastly, everything was pulled everything together with the voiceover work in Final Cut Pro.
