Kite is a self-directed short. Nobody commissioned it, and it exists for one reason: we wanted to prove a specific claim we make to clients — that a hybrid 2D pipeline gets you most of the life of frame-by-frame at a fraction of the drawn volume — on our own time and our own money, before asking anyone to buy it.
The brief we set ourselves
Forty seconds. One character. A performance that has to carry real weight — the moment a kite string goes slack and the character realises it before the audience does.
The constraint was the point: no more than four hundred drawn frames. A purely frame-by-frame version of the same forty seconds would run past a thousand. If the hybrid could not hold up under a hard drawn-frame cap, it was not worth recommending.
What we made
Fourteen shots, cut to a scratch track recorded in the studio, then to a composed piece once the timing was locked.
The body is a Harmony rig: torso, limbs, hair, clothing. It handles walking, turning, the run-up, the arm raise — all the staging, all the movement that reads as position rather than expression.
Everything that carries the performance is drawn. The face, the hands at the two moments they matter, and the four smear frames on the turn. That is where the drawn-frame budget went, and it is why the budget was worth having: forcing the choice made it obvious which frames were doing work.
How it was built
The order mattered more than the technique.
- Boards, then a timed animatic. The edit was locked before anything was rigged. Two shots were cut at this stage — both of them shots we liked, and both redundant once the sequence played end to end.
- Rig before design was final. Deliberately. Building the rig against a near-final design surfaced three deformation problems while the design could still absorb them, rather than after.
- Rough pass on the rig only. No drawn frames at all in the first pass. Watching a performance with a blank face is uncomfortable and extremely useful — it shows you exactly which beats the body is failing to sell, and those are the beats that earn drawn frames.
- Drawn accents last. By this point the list of frames that needed drawing was not a judgement call. It was a list the rough pass had produced.
The drawn-frame budget did not constrain the film. It told us where the film actually was.
What it proved, and what it did not
It proved the pipeline. Three hundred and eighty drawn frames carried a performance that reads, and the rig absorbed two rounds of timing revisions afterwards at close to zero drawing cost — which is the whole argument for hybrid work on anything that will be revised.
What it did not prove: this was one character in a controlled situation with no client, no deadline pressure and no style guide to match. A series with eight characters and a locked look is a harder problem, and we would not pretend otherwise on a call.
It is also worth saying plainly what Kite is for. A new studio has a credibility problem that no amount of copy solves. Self-directed work is how you answer it honestly — by making something and showing it, rather than by describing work you have not done.