introduction to animation

The Point Of View project

On this project, I teamed up with Sabir. We knew that we worked well together as we had already collaborated on several other group projects.

We started off figuring out what storyline to go into. To do this we discussed what sort of ideas we had in mind. I really liked the theme of ‘derealization’ – a feeling that one’s surroundings are not real, especially as a symptom of mental disturbance. I wanted this theme to be part of our project as I have anxiety and have experienced derealization because of it, so that is something very personal to me.

In the end, we decided to go with the main theme of ‘Confrontation’ a point of view of what it is like to confront your future, and have to eventually let go of the past and confront adulthood.

Here is a mood board that I put together for the project:

We both discussed art creators who we wanted to use for our influences in this project. I really look up to a modern animation artist who uses lots of colours and very fluid motions in her work. Her username on social media sites is @lonelymanslazarus and she goes by Daisy. She heavily inspires my work. I love her storytelling and tried to incorporate some of her styles into my own work and this project.

https://linktr.ee/lonelymanslazarus

• YouTube
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Twitter

Sabir suggested the artist Romuald Hazoumè. he is a really fascinating Yoruba artist from the Republic of Bénin. One of the projects which he is most famous for is where he modifies discarded plastic jerry cans and other materials to take on the appearance of faces, in order to carry on the tradition of making masks from his people. We decided to incorporate this idea of strange objects being faces in our project.

Once we had figured out a storyline we worked together to create a storyboard. This is what we came up with:

In order to bring this to life we delegated separate tasks in order to simplify things. I designed some backgrounds and so did Sabir. Here are the backgrounds:

With Sabir’s instructions, I then designed our main character and her two different outfits that are shown in the storyboards.

After that, we both worked separately on our delegated tasks to put together the below animation. I worked with photoshop, creating frame-by-frame animation, using the above designs for reference, whereas Sabir used Adobe After effects to animate, and we edited the different pieces together.

We used the sounds of birds chirping to give the viewer the illusion that everything is fine – that is until we see all the eyes opening around our main character – this is symbolism for her mind awakening. She is becoming an adult. When she looks in the mirror and sees a figure the figure is herself. She is finally seeing herself for who she is becoming, and has to eventually confront. The only sound heard at this point is her own breathing. This is intentional. We considered using unsettling music in the background but we didn’t want the sound to take away from the visuals. In the scene where the main character walks outside, we see all the shadowy figures around our main character. The objects on their heads symbolize their positions in this world and is inspired by the Yoruba artist Romuald Hazoumè. This is where the quiet but unsettling music begins, and the main character falls over and has to come face to face with who she really is.

If I could continue this animation I would add an ending where the main character wakes back up, and she herself has an object on her head symbolizing her new position in this strange but adult world.

I really enjoyed working on this project and with Sabir. I appreciated how he came up with ideas and concepts that I would not have even considered if not for him, and how this contributed to our final project. we worked really well together, with little conflict and I consider this collaboration to be a huge success.