The Ten Commandments of Banquet Serving
A comedy short film about surviving a chaotic wedding as a banquet server. Scroll down to see some art, the script, animatic, and the film itself! All sorts of production goodness!
"Fantastic!!! Delightful, witty, bizarre and personal. A slice of hilarious animated magic for all to devour!" - Jorge R. Gutierrez (Director, The Book of Life)
"It's Hilarious! It's crazy impressive [Griffin] produced this outside [his] demanding school work! Really well-done!" - Chris Houghton (co-creator, Big City Greens)
"A sweet little short!" - Peter Ramsey (Co-director, Spider Man: Into the Spiderverse)
"Fun and funny...Glad I almost never go to weddings!" - Sally Cruikshank (Director, Quasi at the Quackadero)
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ANIMATIC
(Audio not final, all rights reserved)
CONCEPT ART
Character Designs:
Nearly thirty of the characters who appear in The Ten Commandments of Banquet Serving were designed by me.
Below are several!
Character design for Jim with full turnaround. The most astute of observers will notice that he is just a drawing of me.
Character design for Mother of the Bride and full turnaround. She is the only character who I did any concept art for at all. Originally she was a meek little old lady, but I thought it'd be funnier to make her an enormous and jacked homicidal terror. For every other character, I knew exactly what they looked like when I first wrote them!
Character design for the Servers. The one on the right is my sister, but she was never a banquet server. I just don't know that many women. Colors by Gaby Dollahite.
Character design for Jim with full turnaround. The most astute of observers will notice that he is just a drawing of me.
Character Explorations:
Poses for Jim. I knew our film was going to be more focused on the writing and rhythm over the intricacy of the animation, but I still wanted to have some fun drawing more exciting poses for Jim.
Here's your tip, kids: Model a character exactly after yourself because it's easy to know how they will react to things. It also makes drawing different poses pretty easy.
A mouth reference sheet for lip synching used for most of the characters. Only MOTB has a different mouth, so we made a template for all the mouth shapes and gave it to every character. I have always drawn mouths a very specific way, and it was important to translate that to film.
Poses for Jim. I knew our film was going to be more focused on the writing and rhythm over the intricacy of the animation, but I still wanted to have some fun drawing more exciting poses for Jim.
Color Studies:
Mother of the Bride confronts Jim with a bit more aggression than is necessary. A study of more autumnal tones, which we didn't end up going with.
Here's some more spring-ish colors, closer to our final palette, but the colors are too close to Jim's colors.
I always loved going to festivals where our film played in a block of other shorts because it was just so bright and bold it stuck out like a sore thumb. When the New Hampshire Film Festival selected our film, I remember them using the visually darkest shot they could for promotional images, since otherwise our screencaps were so annoyingly bright compared to the other films in the program.
Mother of the Bride confronts Jim with a bit more aggression than is necessary. A study of more autumnal tones, which we didn't end up going with.