In the student film Scales, a small pangolin takes on mercenaries that sneak into a village soon after he arrives. Drawing on influence from Ming Dynasty art and architecture, as well as contemporary animation like Mulan and Sagwa, the film is currently in competition at multiple film festivals.
Scales was produced as a thesis project by students at Utah Valley University. Kailtlyn Andrus developed the concept and visual design of the short, Alyssa Peterson and Arlo Belconger directed the film, while Gabriel Coppieters oversaw the sound design and special effects. The animation for this five-minute film was completed over the course of a single semester.
We had the chance to sit down with Alyssa, Arlo and Gabriel to discuss the research, teamwork and adaptability required to make Scales.
Please introduce yourself and describe your work on Scales.
Alyssa: My name is Alyssa Peterson. I graduate next year and I was one of the directors on Scales. The other director is Arlo. I teach right now for UVU as a TA, so the only thing I’m doing is animation.
Arlo: I’m Arlo Belconger. Like Alyssa said, I was the other director on Scales. I was the animation director. So I made the animatic, and made sure all of the movement looked good. I had my hand in a little bit of everything.
To be honest, it was an exciting challenge, and really fun to get to explore so many different things. I got to help other people get an idea of what the final vision wanted to look like, and therefore got to contribute to their work, which was an honor. And I am currently building out my storyboard portfolio while I’m working a full-time job at a college.
Gabriel: My name’s Gabe Coppieters. I was the special effects lead and editor on Scales. I also oversaw the music, sound and voice acting. I’ve graduated since.
I’ll be honest, I’ve been looking for animation work with not a ton of luck. So I’m working on side-projects, writing a screenplay, doing early designs for a game I want to develop, and working part-time at a restaurant.
Who came up with the concept for Scales?
Arlo: We actually had a whole semester for just brainstorming, learning how to pitch, and then finally pitching to the class. But the person who pitched the pangolin idea was Kaitlyn Andrus, who is wonderful and unfortunately couldn’t make it today. But her creativity was the lifeblood behind the project, for sure.
Alyssa: Yeah, she not only came up with the concept, but she did a lot of the character design as well, and her character designs are the designs you see in the film.
Gabriel: We have to give Kaitlyn credit because she did the whole lighting look that we had by the end of the short. That was all Kaitlyn, that was genius.
Arlo: She really went out of her way to find and create a template in the node view of Toon Boom Harmony that we could copy and use on scenes. Because one of the main challenges of a student film is the time pressure.
We had a little over a full semester to pull off five minutes of animation, which is no small feat. Because she went through all of that extra leg work we were able to streamline the post-production process. I have no idea if it ever would have gotten done if she wasn’t so cool.
Who designed the film’s beautiful backgrounds?
Arlo: Aha! My time to shine. So we actually did a lot of research leading up to the film. I took it upon myself to put together a design document to inspire us in the directions. And one of the things we use for the backgrounds is actually traditional Chinese paintings.
We were really inspired by those bold, inky strokes and that very painterly texture. We needed to find a way to digitize it and modernize it a little bit for our look. The research phase of the design process was so instrumental in the final product.
And it was definitely a collaborative process. To put things into perspective, as we were moving into the animation part, I broke my ankle. I was animating all of my scenes from a wheelchair and everybody just really put their heads together and picked up the slack.
This film was successful because we had such a good team who was willing to come together, and we also had a magnificent mentor in Rodayne Esmay, who absolutely would inspire us and bring us together and give essential feedback.
How did you feel Storyboard Pro and Harmony held up to the challenges on your particular project?
Arlo: The fact that I was able to storyboard in Storyboard Pro and transfer unpack those scenes directly into Harmony and keep all my camera moves made the process so smooth.
You don’t realize when you volunteer to direct something just how much administrative work there is. Somebody’s got to be in charge of unloading those files, putting all of the backgrounds in, putting all of the rigs in the proper files, assembling everything, making everything ready to work with.
And because we’re using Toon Boom’s software in tandem with each other, it made that process go a lot smoother.
Alyssa: Yeah, I was going to say that. The process of going from Storyboard Pro to Toon Boom Harmony was really instrumental in our film. And since we had done a lot of pre-production already, and we had our rigs built, which obviously we also couldn’t have done without Harmony, we were able to get into the animating a lot easier. We had the tools available to us to really expedite the process and make it possible to get the film done in as short of time as we did.
Gabriel, you mentioned that you were responsible for the effects and a lot of the sound design.
Gabriel: I oversaw that. We brought on two music composers, and then three sound designers, Whitney Schramm, Trevor Brown and Trent Williams. They were wonderful to work with, and they really did all the heavy lifting for music and sound respectively.
Alyssa: It was wonderful to be able to have those people, because they were from a different department and still within the university. And that’s part of what makes it so good, I believe, is the fact that we were able to do interdisciplinary work together.
Arlo: We got practice building bridges, that’s for sure. And Gabe is really underselling the influence that he had on the sound design and the music. Unifying a whole bunch of different artists who aren’t all on the same page is no small task.
What were some of the highlights and challenges of production?
Gabriel: Yeah. What was tricky was finding the balance in tone. A lot of really early sound effects had a cartoonish and over-the-top approach. I like that especially for kicks and punches. But we were giggling at some of the other ones, especially in dramatic scenes.
I decided, “No, we really want the emotion to be the focus. It’s got to be more subtle. It’s got to be more realistic and more immersive than entertaining.” It differed from scene to scene.
A lot of my critiques were that sound should either be different or completely removed, or it needs to be quieter. We really thought that the dialogue was the most important.
How did you strike that tonal balance? Because on the one hand, you do want to feel the stakes of what’s happening. On the other hand, it’s a pangolin fighting a bunch of armed guys.
Alyssa: I think a lot of it has to go back to our script. Arlo and I worked on writing the script. We had the concept from Kaitlyn, and she wrote up a little draft for us to reference and work from.
But Arlo and I really spent time pouring into the dialogue, and deciding what would be appropriate for a girl as young as Mei to say, and the appropriate level of danger to put her in compared to a more adult film.
What were your influences on this project? I was reminded of Kung Fu Panda, since they’re both about an unlikely, adorable animal using martial arts to save the day.
Alyssa: There were a couple that we referred back to. One, of course, being Mulan, which obviously is the the quintessential Chinese story that we think of as Westerners. But another one was a very little known PBS series called Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat.
And so when we were working on developing our style, we took both of those references and compared them to the source material of Chinese paintings. We were able to create this style that felt true to the reference, but was our own style as compared to these other sources of reference that we used.
Arlo: And that goal bled into every aspect of the production because we wanted to obviously draw inspiration from these traditional Chinese elements. But also, we’re not pretending to be Chinese people making a Chinese movie. We are American students doing our best.
So we wanted to mix that modern sensibility and this very interesting aesthetic. And when we knew that we wanted to make a movie about a pangolin, and when we narrowed it down to a Chinese pangolin, we also had to narrow it down to a dynasty, and just further narrow until we understood what we were being inspired by.
Sagwa and Mulan were very helpful for that, because Mulan takes place during the Ming dynasty, which is the dynasty we were referencing. So we were able to reference art and also photographs of buildings that were built during that time. The Forbidden City is a really good example of Ming dynasty architecture that we referenced a lot of.
For the backgrounds, there was also a little-known show that I watched on WB when I was little called Shaolin Showdown, and they had those really bold background strokes. Samurai Jack was also influential. We spent a lot of time thinking about how to go about this in a respectful way. I actually spent quite a bit of time consulting with Alex Yuan, who was the director of the Chinese language program at our university.
And even the instructor leading the composing class where we got our composers from – he had done music for the Chinese New Year festival in L.A. We ended up being able to pull from a lot of people’s expertise.
One semester is a tight timeline for a five-minute film with that much research. Did you feel you had to compromise on certain areas of production to meet your deadline?
Alyssa: Thankfully Arlo came up with a really strong spreadsheet, so I don’t feel like we had to sacrifice much. And we did focus on animation first and foremost, as the most important thing that we wanted to focus on.
But some of the things that got left behind, and then were picked up by people on our team, were backgrounds and lighting. So all of those things that were not as central and as important to the story we were trying to tell were less prioritized than the animation, than the dialogue, than the sound. That was just really important to telling a good story.
Arlo: For me, it was very difficult to step back enough to be not just a perfectionist, but a leader. You have to make a decision at the end of the day. So that was very difficult but just that instinct of saying, “Okay, this is good enough.”
Gabriel: I really agree with that. I’m such a perfectionist when it comes to my art. But no, you’re going to have to delegate. You can not animate dust and water and fight scenes and do the music and do the sound. There’s no way. You have to let other people do their job, their specialty. I had to compromise on not being so controlling.
How would you say the response has been so far?
Alyssa: The reception has been really incredible. We have received invitations to one film festival, and we placed in another film festival. We’ve also had a lot of really great reception at UVU, which was all our scope ever was.
But it’s become so much more than just this small film from a small school in Utah. It’s becoming this film that is hitting more of an international stage.
Arlo: Especially after we got in contact with the Pangolin Crisis Fund. Because we knew, when Kaitlyn first pitched Scales, there was always this knowledge going around the classroom that pangolins are really, really endangered.
So when we got in contact with them, I really didn’t think it would go anywhere but they were really incredible and helpful, and they were excited about the project. To see how infectious that excitement was, to spread the word, was really helpful.
- Scales is available to view on YouTube.
- Want to see more from the crew? Alyssa Peterson’s portfolio can be found on ArtStation. Arlo Belconger’s demo reels and junior project can be viewed YouTube. Keep up with Gabriel Coppieters’ projects on Instagram and YouTube.
- Ready to get started on your thesis film? Students can get up to 84% off on licenses for Harmony and Storyboard Pro.
