Project Introduction

Uncle Bigfoot began as an original screenplay and character-development project that I created alongside students in Advanced Storyboarding. Rather than developing the project within a single course, I used it as a continuing production framework that could move between classes, allowing students to contribute at different stages of visual development and preproduction.

The project expanded through 2D Rigging, Digital Painting and Illustration, and multiple Advanced Storyboarding courses. Students explored character design, concept painting, environments, vehicles, supporting assets, storyboards, and animatics while working from a shared screenplay and an evolving visual language. My role combined writer, character designer, visual-development artist, instructor, and creative director, providing original artwork and production materials while using draw overs, demonstrations, and critique to help individual student contributions become part of a larger project.

Establishing the Characters

I developed the original cast while writing the screenplay, exploring a broad range of silhouettes, proportions, personalities, and relationships before refining the principal characters. Because the story moves between children, adults, hunters, and a family of Sasquatches, the cast needed enough visual variety to make each character immediately recognizable while still feeling as though they belonged in the same world.

These designs became reference material as the project moved into subsequent courses. Students could work from established characters while also contributing new designs and refinements as the needs of the story expanded.

Extending the Character Language

As the project developed, students were asked to design characters beyond the original principal cast while working within the established visual language of the project. This shifted the assignment from simply inventing isolated characters toward solving production-design problems: new characters needed to feel distinct while remaining compatible with the proportions, shapes, and stylistic decisions already established for the film.

The strongest student designs were incorporated into the evolving project, allowing the visual world to grow through collaboration rather than requiring every production decision to originate with a single artist.

Visual Development Through Digital Painting

The project next became a major assignment in Digital Painting and Illustration. Because the screenplay was too large for each student to visualize in its entirety, I divided the story into sections and assigned students specific moments to develop. Students moved through thumbnails and color studies before producing finished concept paintings based on scenes from the screenplay.

Critique became part of the production process. I created draw overs when composition, staging, character construction, or storytelling needed additional development, giving students a concrete visual response that they could carry into their final paintings. The resulting work served two purposes: students practiced a professional visual-development workflow while the project accumulated a growing library of imagery that could inform later storyboarding and production decisions.

Designing the Production World

As Uncle Bigfoot returned to Advanced Storyboarding, the design problem expanded beyond the principal cast. Students developed locations, vehicles, background characters, and story-specific props needed to make the screenplay function as a production. These assignments required students to consider continuity, scale, spatial relationships, and how an asset would need to appear repeatedly from different viewpoints.

The growing design library also gave later storyboard artists more concrete information to work from. Instead of reinventing the world from shot to shot, students could stage sequences using established characters, locations, vehicles, and supporting designs—bringing the project closer to the shared visual-development process of an animation production.

Developing the Story Through Storyboarding

The project returned to Advanced Storyboarding with a much larger visual foundation already in place. Students were assigned sections of the screenplay rather than being asked to board the entire film, allowing them to concentrate on staging, shot design, continuity, performance, and pacing within a manageable sequence.

My own development drawings and redraws were available as reference alongside the growing collection of character and environment designs. Students then interpreted those materials through their own storyboard sequences. Multiple approaches to the same larger story allowed us to evaluate different solutions for camera placement, acting, composition, and editorial rhythm before deciding which ideas were strongest.

The most successful sequences progressed beyond individual boards into animatics, allowing timing and editorial decisions to become part of the development process.

Iteration Across Courses

One of the most valuable aspects of Uncle Bigfoot has been the ability to revisit the same project from different disciplinary perspectives. Character designs developed for one assignment became reference for later visual-development work. Concept paintings informed the world seen by storyboard artists. Faculty redraws created for one group became reference material for students encountering the project in a later course. Storyboards, in turn, revealed new design problems that required additional environments, vehicles, props, and supporting characters.

Rather than treating each course as an isolated exercise, the project allowed student work to accumulate. Each class inherited decisions from the students who came before them and contributed material that could support the next stage of development.

Collaborative Production as Pedagogy

Uncle Bigfoot demonstrates how a continuing creative project can function as a shared laboratory for teaching animation production. Students were not all asked to perform the same task or produce identical outcomes. Instead, different courses approached the project through the skills being taught at that stage: character development, digital painting, visual development, production design, storyboarding, and editorial timing.

Working within a common project also introduced an important constraint of collaborative production: every contribution had to respond to work that already existed. Students learned to inherit design decisions, solve problems within an established visual language, respond to critique, and create work intended to support artists who might encounter the project later.

My role moved between creator, instructor, designer, and creative director—establishing the initial story and characters while also drawing alongside students, providing visual feedback, refining production materials, and helping connect work created across different courses. The result is not simply a collection of assignments built around the same screenplay, but an evolving production in which teaching, creative research, and collaborative development continually inform one another.

Uncle Bigfoot remains an evolving project, leaving opportunities for future students to build upon the characters, environments, and story development established by the classes that came before them.