A grizzly bear escapes from the city zoo. A man works late on his wedding anniversary.
I’ve always been a fan of cramming the bizarre into the regular, and backlighting a man’s desperate commute home from work with the escape of a 600-pound grizzly bear is a prime example of said cramming. On one hand, Grizzly Business is an unconventional way to use the classic idea of man vs. nature to address how a slanted work-life balance can affect what matters most. On the other hand, Grizzly Business is a stupid joke that makes me chuckle. On the third, secret hand I keep tucked in my jacket, Grizzly Business is a personal experiment in bringing a project like this to life as a one-man animation crew. The past two years of working on this project have been the most in tune I’ve ever been with my creative practice, and the sheer growth I’ve felt as both an artist and filmmaker has made the whole process so worthwhile. It’s even made my own daily commute home from work creatively inspiring rather than soul-sucking. Almost.
- Developing The Cast -
Barry here has been put through the wringer over the course of his short animated life. Following the completion of An Otherwise Empty Bus, an animated vignette from late 2021, I knew I wanted to give him a considerable face lift for this project. Originally the plan had just been to spruce up the Empty Bus version of the character, which resulted in a somewhat lackluster “Barry 1.5”. After taking a break from the project to work on skill development without the pressures of a long-form effort, I came back with a determination to rebuild the character entirely from scratch. While I definitely implemented new techniques I’d learned during my hiatus, this culminated in a very, very creepy “New Barry”. I originally justified this creative direction by re-aiming my intent towards exploring the wonders of the uncanny valley through character design, but I ended up arriving at the conclusion that this exploration was far too distracting from the narrative I was trying to achieve with this film. I rolled back the detail, effectively reinvented the character, and landed in a good spot to steer the visual direction of the rest of the project.
The original designs for the other cast members were initially based heavily on the rules I established with Barry 1.5’s look. Once I moved past that, I had a lot more room to push each character’s design in unique ways.
- Developing the story -
Original sketch of Barry, May 2021
Much like Barry himself, Grizzly Business has evolved a lot since the story’s original conception. Initially titled Home for Dinner, it was going to be a much smaller project: man and wife are eating dinner, second, identical man arrives home from work, stunned confusion is experienced by all, and the second man reveals himself to be a bear, mauling the couple. When I originally pitched it as my final animation project for school, it simply wasn’t ready. I tabled the project and only revisited it months later when I decided to overhaul the story and treat it as my first multi-year short film effort. Being an independent filmmaker, I had a lot of freedom to manipulate the narrative as I worked on it, but I still wanted to have a clear direction from the get-go, hence the storyboard you see below. That storyboard evolved into a rough animatic, and that animatic evolved into an even rougher blocked-out pass in 3D. At this point, a new definitive ending was added and most of the creative decisions had been made, albeit in a less than appealing version to watch. From there, I moved on to the next phase of iteration, in which character animation was given extra oomph and overall narrative structure was finalized. Even still, it was still missing a majority of the environment development, lighting, a fantastic musical score from my friend Pressley Myer, and the final 20% of animation polish. Each of these iterations of the project may not be entirely impressive on their own, but this undertaking has been such an large part of my life for so long and its important to me that I treat that creative process with honesty. I hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtain!
