When a Wizard is called away from his class, his Student's ambition gets the best of him, and a spell goes horribly wrong...
The Vanishing Spell is a short film by Mage Tower Animation, a group comprised of myself, Aaron Rogers, and several others. We made this film for our Animation Capstone project at Middle Tennessee State University over the course of 2022 with Rick Lewis and Kevin McNulty as our faculty advisors.
During the Spring 2022 semester, we went through the pre-production process and started production on the film. Even though we went through several drafts of the film, Aaron and I always knew we wanted to make a film centered around magic and fantasy. The Wizard, his apprentice, and a spell going wrong were there from the very beginning, even if things changed over time. Once that was done we moved on to character design, which Aaron was in charge of, environment design, which I was in charge of, storyboarding, and making an animatic. Our animatic was shown at a meeting of the MTSU ACM SIGGRAPH Student Chapter, where we got a lot of feedback that helped shape the final story.
After that, we spent the rest of the spring semester and the summer starting production. We started by working on the characters. I did the modeling, texturing, and rigging for the Wizard while Aaron was in charge of the Apprentice. After our characters we were done we began working on the environment, with us both modeling and texturing and Aaron doing the lighting for the environment. The final thing the two of us did before the start of the fall semester was shoot the reference footage for the film.
During the fall semester, Aaron and I finished production and did post-production for our film. We started by making a pre-viz pass on our film. After that, the two of us split up our shots and animated for the majority of the semester. Starting in November I spent several nights in the lab rendering the film. We finished animating the week of Thanksgiving and after that, we began post-production. We continued working on VFX until early December when I edited together the final film.
We knew we would be too busy animating so we looked for others to help do the sound for our film. Alex Laboda, a Senior in MTSU's audio production program served as sound designer, audio mixer, foley artist, and re-recording mixer. Alex also served as the voice actor for the Wizard while Anna Brown served as the voice for his Apprentice. Shamira Hawkins, another senior in MTSU's audio production program assisted Alex as a tracking engineer. While Alex and his team were working on the voices and sound effects, I worked with Gruskov Music, a self-taught composer known for his albums inspired by several Star Wars novels, to make the score for the film.
The film premiered at a special screening at MTSU on December 9th, 2022, and was selected to be in both the January 2024 Lift-Off First-Time Filmmaker Session and the 2024 Marin County Fair International Festival of Short Film & Video. It was also selected as a finalist in the 2023 Los Angeles Animation Festival.
The Vanishing Spell was my first time working as part of a team on something like this. It was also my first time working on something as big as this. Working on this film greatly improved my skills as a modeler, texture artist, rigger, animator, and compositing artist. It was the first time I was truly proud of the texturing and rigging I did on a character. Working allowed me to become more familiar with After Effects and was my introduction to Cinema 4D. Working on this film was by far the most challenging and fun project I've ever worked on and I can't wait to show it to the world.
