the animation in “Ascensia”

Originally, I was planning on doing the film digitally. Here’s some tests from what I was originally planning:

But when production actually started, I realized that I missed traditional animation, so I decided to go with something closer to Goodbye Forever Party’s process. The animation process on Ascensia was very labor-intensive, especially on my end. All of the paper animation was drawn by me, by hand. I spent September 2018-April 2019 working pretty much nonstop on the animation.

The shots that were done entirely with pencil were registered cutouts, meaning we kept the drawings attached to their peg registration at the bottom of the paper.

We would then shoot these shots on the multiplane, where we would replace each drawing in the sequence by swapping them out on the pegbar underneath where the camera could see.

For a big bulk of the shots, I animated the heads and hands separately from the rest of the body, which I kept as stiff construction paper cutouts.

These shots would also be shot on the multiplane, but the difference from the pegbar shots was that I had to stop-motion the cutouts around.

The color technique was based on an idea by my friend/assistant Jeanette Fantone- They were working on their guest animation segment, for when Ascensia sings her first keyboard song, and they decided to color the animation with gouache, which they then inverted the colors on in post. At the time, I was trying to find ways to color the film physically with no digital process, and I thought this would be really cool to do for the whole film. And so that was what we did! The whole film is colored by hand with watered down gouache, and sometimes watercolor.

A problem we ended up running into: By the time I got to shooting the shots, some of the pieces, like the very small and detached hands, would be lost. Here’s my friend/assistant Misuzu Shibano demonstrating how small the hands were. You can see in the final film, in a bunch of shots the characters just have missing hands!

Benni Quintero was my shooting assistant + special effects artist. Benni is one of my best friends in the world and also one of my favorite artists (I actually based Lil P on Benni). The drawings Lil P makes in the film are real bonafide drawings by Benni, which I took and stop motioned Lil P to look like they were drawing them. They did all kinds of incredible work on Ascensia, from just sorting the folders containing all the frames, to shooting shots, to the stop-motion animation for Ascensia’s 3rd sermon, to stuff like this:

Since I based Lil P on Benni, I decided that I wanted Benni to be in complete creative control of the animation in Lil P’s hole scene near the end of the film. Benni took all my drawings, and created the backgrounds and all the effects in that scene. I think it turned out amazing, and stands out in such a cool way. I love Benni!

Benni also did all of the effects on the VHS that the disciples leave behind, by transferring the real shots to a CRT. They played around with it and got all kinds of amazing effects, that were very hard to choose from!

The guest animation on the film was hands-off on my part. The main thing I provided my guest animators with was just an animatic clip. They were allowed to portray the scene however they wanted, just as long as the same information was conveyed.

Here’s my board for Narnia’s flashback, which Victoria Vincent animated:

In the amazing Kelly Ficarra’s case- I told her that I hated what I had come up with for Mira’s flashback, and that she could do basically whatever she wanted. Kelly took the notes me and Jenna Caravello had taken when writing Mira’s backstory, and boarded her whole sequence based on that. Kelly’s sequence is one of my favorites in the whole film.