Short Changed is a story about how corruption is present everywhere, even at a small fountain in the middle of a park, where patrons come to make a wish. Corruption is personified as man, named Mr. C, who comes to the foutain to steal all of the gold coins that hold each patron's wish. The only one that notices him doing anything wrong is a goose named Gustav, who tries to stop Mr. C's evil deeds underwater while the park goers are none the wiser.

I was one of two students assigned to work on the goose character. My partner worked on a solution for the wings while I had to figure out how to rig the goose's body and face. This required a lot of research on my part, leading to hours of looking at a goose's skeleton, watching video of them, and even observing the ones that liked to hang out at the fountain all but five minutes from where the lab was located. This was the first character I rigged so a lot of what I did had to be redone a number of times as I got accustomed to the capstone's rigging system and basic rigging concepts. It was enjoyable for me though as I got to weight-paint (something that I vastly enjoy), do a bit of scripting (which up until this point I hadn't done), and even got to work collaboratively with someone that was just as interested in rigging as I was.

Short Changed was a short animated film created in the University of Washington's Animation Capstone from 2013-2014 while I was a student in the class and still fairly new to the core concepts of rigging. While we were developing the film, we had some stand-in characters from past capstone films that we used as part of the crowd (mainly the mother of the young girl, and the couple that wished to have a child.) However, as the film entered its final month of production, it became evident to everyone that these crowd characters stuck out because their styles were drastically different from the style that our film gravitated towards. At a meeting with the staff it was decided that we would build three new characters in the span of two weeks. That meant finished concept art, models, and rigs so that the animators would have time to animate these characters in place of the old ones.

This proved to be rather challenging because I was still new to the rigging process and the only other character that I had worked on was the goose for the film. It was a lot of trial and error at first while I was trying to learn more about the rigging system at the university and about joint placement and orientation, something that we only had time to cover briefly. However, through this experience I learned the rigging system quickly and was able to acquaint myself with many rigging ideas and principles in a short amount of time. It would be a couple of years until I was completely comfortable with them, but it was a good start. Through practice I became better at it and with the staff's help we finished the characters in time to be placed into the film.