A busy day at the coffee shop reveals a series of quirky vignettes, where strange yet simple moments subtly unfold.
Film Trailer
Featured in
BGSU's Animation & Film Senior Showcase (April '25)
East Village New York Film Festival [Awarded Best Animation] (May '25)
Semi-finalist in
New York Short Animation Festival
Stop-motion and 2D animation are used in combination to create Shared Grounds, a collection of animated coffee shop vignettes. Together, the juxtaposition of these two styles showcases the textured and tactile aesthetics of stop-motion with the expressiveness and fluidity of 2D animation.
This four-minute-long short film features an original score written and performed by Meredith Gulla.
From Concept to Thesis Film....
A bit about the process
Shared Grounds was completed as my senior animation capstone project, fulfilling my BFA in Digital Arts at Bowling Green State University.
Ideas into animation
Animatic
Lineart
Color
To get the general idea across while planning, the animatic was sketched simply and quickly. After the idea was more fleshed out, 2D drawn animated scenes got a rougher animation with black line art. Afterwards, color was added, lines were exchanged for solid color shapes, and timing was adjusted slightly for a finished and polished animated scene.
Puppets in process
Apart from the metal armature, the two humanoid puppets were put together with relatively basic household craft materials.
Hair was comprised of yarn; heads, faces, and hands are made of polymer clay; clothing is $0.99 craft felt held together with hot glue and a whole lot of luck.
Mouse's armature is made out of simple craft wire wrapped in layers of fur-like material.
Little magnets hot glued to the bottoms of his feet allow him to stand on magnetic surfaces.
Lights... Camera.... Animation!
My film utilizes two slightly different styles of stop motion: 2D "cut-out" style & puppet animation. Each style came with its own positives and setbacks. Working in a physical space, lighting and positioning were a very important part of creating polished scenes.
Compositing stop motion footage over 2D backgrounds and animation
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To bring the two styles of animation together, each scene took a whole lot of editing. Here's an example breakdown of what it takes to create this 10-second-long scene:
1. Raw stop motion footage
+ Keying background
+ Key cleaner
+ 2D drawn background
+ Diving board animation
2. Half composited scene
+ Mouse drop-shadow
+ Bean splash animation
+ 2D drawn foreground details
+ Clip splitting & reordering layers
3. Completed Mouse Animation
Ready to be compiled with the rest of the film!
Little details make the difference.
Throwing it all together
After every individual scene was animated, 68 different Adobe After Effects layers brought this film to life, held together with the strength of my old laptop.
