We follow Elf throughout their day working at Santa’s workshop, a day full of traffic jams, hard labour and faulty printers.
Hopefully the holly jolly boss will understand.
Pre-Production
To start production I had to figure out what story I wanted to tell. I settled on a the theme of work as that was on the mind and explored some ideas from there.
I watched jaywalker, a UPA animated short film and was inspired by this shot in it. I created a rough sketch with an elf as the driver and that started inspiring some ideas.
Jaywalker
Christmas Spirit Concept Sketch
Christmas Spirit
Story & Boarding
A rough script was written by me and was only used as an outline for the storyboards. It's here where developed the story as a slice of life film following elf through a day at Santa's workshop during Christmas, and found my antagonist Santa.
Using the rough script I visualised into the storyboards, it's here where I started exploring my own UPA style for the film.
these boards were drawn in Photoshop and were used in the rough animatic in After Effects.
The last step in pre-production was finalising the character designs with a turnaround.
Fleshing out the style and colour palette, visualising the expressions and designs in 3D, and establishing heights between characters.
Production
I started by painting all 35 backgrounds for the film in Photoshop. I continued that UPA style for the backgrounds in the film using reference like Mr. Magoo.
I tried to limit the amount the layers needed for backgrounds, for example in the first shot the cars and wheels are on there own layer but everything behind it was exported one flatten layer.
Once I finished all the backgrounds I had to rig the characters in Toon Boom Harmony. I created two character rigs and few props. Following that I built each scene in Toon Boom, placing in all assets for those shots.
Animating
And now the animating can begin. Like any other animated production I placed in the keys, tweened the shots, and made adjustments as I went along.
Post Production
I edited the final film in Premier Pro and did the sound design in Audition. Once I had an edit I was happy with I sent it to the composer Mitchell Tanner to compose the score.
I then made a few final tweaks and production was over
Film Poster
To promote the film on different platforms I designed a poster, I chose to focus on the main character Elf and their distinctive hat.
Festivals
Now that the film is complete, it's time to share it with audiences.
To achieve this I used FilmFreeway and submitted my short film to over 40 different film festivals across the world for it to be screened.
I successfully screened my short film with Lift-Off Global Network First-Time Filmmaker Volume 11, Mediorite Get Seen Film Festival 2025, Sugar Loaf Film Festival 2025 and it was awarded Best European by Reale Film Festival.
