Faculty of Art

Experimental Animation

Maya Harding

03 │ Cloud Watchers Pre-Production

Cloud Watchers was a film made as part of OCAD U’s Animation Studio House in the Winter Semester of 2026. The class is structured so that students can experience an animation production pipeline from beginning to end. After the first week, every student pitches a minute to a minute and a half long film idea. Through a voting process, films are selected to move to the storyboarding phase, and then narrowed down further for the pre production/production phases. Cloud Watchers was my pitch. It was one of three films that was selected this semester to be made to completion. Please view the finished film/a more in-depth description of it on my e-portfolio.

“The original style frames that I made for the work highlights the main elements that I wanted to use to inform the final style/film structure. 2D and digital collage, with a noise filter that unifies the styles and gives it the slight fuzz of an older screen. Saturated backgrounds, in a non-descript open field/park. Notably, the world was entirely structured from texture. This can still be seen in the trees of the final film, the trunk is constructed from cutouts of tree bark and the leaves are close up images of foliage. The clouds in my style frames are photographic, and accompanied by drawn counterparts made with a pencil texture. Gurnoor Singh and Isha Abbott helped with story development. We discussed the whole story as a group, and then divided the storyboarding work. I cleaned up all of the storyboard panels and made adjustments where it was needed. I boarded the cloud sequences in the second half of the work. I edited parts of the animatic in Cap Cut, and continued making adjustments into the Pre Production phase. I also created character model sheets for the dragon and bunny cloud characters. Thank you to Carly Lee who made the sky background on the Cloud Dragon model sheet, and for Letitia Chui for standardizing our Cloud style.The main program I use to draw/edit images is Sketchbook (formerly known as Autodesk Sketchbook). My main source for images is Pixabay.Animators Who Worked on the Finished Frames Featured Next to the Storyboard:Nithya George - Lead Character AnimatorLetitia Chui - Lead Cloud AnimatorJessica Lin - Character Roughs/CleanupsNolan Xia - 3D Animation, Character Cleanup/Colour ArtistMaya Harding - Cloud Roughs/CleanupsJoan Maio - Cloud Roughs/CleanupsJiahao Di - Cloud CleanupsCarly Lee - Cloud CleanupsSarah Yousif - Cloud CleanupsGurnoor Singh - Cloud RoughsAngela Lin - Cloud Roughs”