YOLK

Introducing YOLK.

The final product following a year of sweat, tears, and late hours.

Let me begin by thanking you, the viewer, for showing an interest in my Sheridan thesis film, YOLK. It's not often that I get the opportunity to dedicate an entire year to a passion project, and I am so glad I got this incredible chance. I learned a lot about each step of the film making process by creating this animated short from beginning to end. I hope you enjoy viewing my step-by-step procedure available only on this page.

The film is a non-nonsensical comedy following the journey of an young egg, whose potential is abruptly crushed when he becomes the common fried egg.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to tackle a film with underlying themes of self doubt and broken dreams through the most humorous methods I could come up with. In the end, the theme became very loosely ingrained in the film, while I allowed the entertainment aspect to take over. This is inspired by my own struggles with self-acceptance, and subsequently, the coping method of humour. To me, if the film makes the viewer smile, I will have achieved my goal of bringing just a little bit of joy to their day.

And thus, YOLK was hatched.

PRE-PRODUCTION

PRE-PRO

Concept Art

concept art

My initial imagining of YOLK was very different from how it ended up looking. In the beginning, I had planned to take on an old-fashioned sepia-toned aged booked look. Over the summer, I'd visited an art gallery in Tianjin that inspired me to make the switch into a colourful watercolour theme. The story itself also went from a fairly standard character story to the crazy film it became today.

First Sketches Every film starts from somewhere. Mine began with some pen doodles of a sad little egg.	More Sketches After coming up with a concept, I played with the idea a bit more. Around this stage, I had an idea of the theme I wanted, but no picture of the film in mind satisfied me at the time. I was picturing it as a character sketch, and it just wasn't working for me. In my mind, I wanted my audience to laugh out loud and remember the film, but I couldn't see how I could achieve that. This was a heavy art block phase.	Boards Boards Boards Below I've included a few selections of my more complete boards, but it took a while for it to even reach that stage. I spent many hours filling out pages and pages of these quick hand-drawn compositions.
Floor Plan Layout has always been difficult for me, so I can't emphasize enough how helpful it was to map things out this way.	Egg Stage Early concept art of YOLK in his shell stage.	Hatching Stage Early concept art of YOLK in his hatching stage. This character design is one of the only ones I experimented with, and made it to the final film.
YOLK Early concept art of YOLK in his main stage. I'd initially pictured the film as more of a classic cartoon, so YOLK had been designed with more movement and autonomy in mind.	Defeated YOLK Early concept art of YOLK in his depressed stage. This version never made it to the final film.	YOLK poses These poses were constructed based on YOLK as more of a character animation film.
Character Expressions One of my favourite things about this character is the amount of fun I got to have with his facial expressions.	Dudebro A solid image of this guy never formed in my mind, but when I drew him it just felt right. Based off my friend, Harhim Choi, paired with Jeffrey Dahmer glasses.	Background Experimentation 1 I wanted the story to take place in an Easter Egg world, so these colour palettes were an exploration of what the skies would look like. In the end, it got toned down in order to place more focus onto the characters, and give the already chaotic film a bit of breathing room.
Background Experimentation 2	Chicken Coop Toned At one point, I'd entertained the idea of hand-creating stop-motion backgrounds for the film. Ultimately, this idea was scraped due the time restraints, but I had designed several key settings in the film around the possibility of real textures live-action shots.	Chicken Coop Colour An early exploration of colours in the final film.
Kitchen Interior At one point the room was a rectangular shape, before I decided to go nuclear egg-everything.	House Exterior One thing I wish I got to do more in this film were long establishing shots that could show off the intricacy in the world I had in mind. Alas, it's just not that kind of film.

Storyboards

storyboards

As I've mentioned before, YOLK underwent several extreme changes through the duration of its conception. I initially pitched it as a wholesome comedy piece based around self-discovery and self-acceptance. By the time the project entered production, however, it had become a full-fledged chaotic comedy story. Through out the story planning phase of the project, I created over 10 versions of the storyboards, each different enough to be its own story.

YOLK Boards

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