Experimental animation about the feeling of having to know where do you want to get, what do you want to do, what are your goals and knowing absolutely nothing.
I graduated in 2018/1 from UNISUL with a Bachelors degree in Design and for my final project i chose to make a 2d animated short. This post will show you the steps i had to go through to get to the finished animation. I hope this inspires people to make their own animations even with little knowledge of how to make one.
The Idea
The first ideas i had were far from this one. I was thinking about making a Poster Collection About LGBT Issues, then my mind wondered to making a ZINE about it that could be distributed in schools and then i started to talk to my advisor about what i liked to do within design and what could be a project that i would be proud of and could execute.
I arrived at animation, it was something that involved drawing and creating something moving about the subject that i chose. I found some researches about LGBT prejudice in high school here in Brazil and the numbers were traumatising to say the least. I was pretty wrecked from reading the stories of these young people that were abused, yelled at and beaten. So i chose to try and portray what those people went through. I encountered several open researches with testimonials from lgbt students and began to select those that were similar to each other to see what was happening to them.
Writing/Storyboarding
Writing the story for me was the most difficult part. I'm not very good at it and the theme was getting to me on an emotional level. Since i was making this animation on my own and couldn't get help since it was an individual assignment i opted to not use any dialogue. I wanted the music and the image to speak for themselves. So i ended up using the storyboard as my main story tool because i could figure them out better by drawing then writing it.
Finding the Look
After i finished the storyboard and was content with it i started brainstorming for the look and feel of the animation. What were the colors i wanted to use, the textures, the characters features and so on.
The mains references i used and that helped shape this animation the most were from artist and animator Alex Grigg, the movie Breakfast Club directed by John Hughes, artist and animator Mabel Ye, and the movie The Royal Tenenbaums directed by Wes Anderson.
The Characters
The main character is Cacá, a 16 year old girl, that identifies as a lesbian and is constantly bullied at school. She was a combination of all the students i saw in the research phase. I went through all the research to gather the data of age, gender, ethnicity and sexuality.
For the secondary characters i wanted to keep the design simple and i thought about making them in the images of mannequins to represent society's acceptable standards.
The Backgrounds
For the background art i also used a lot of the research to define what parts of the school they would be. Which places did the violence and bullying happened, where did the character felt safe and so on. I used a lot of reference from schools here in Brazil, where you can find a lot of bathroom tagging which inspired the scene where she feels all the weight of the words people write on those walls.
Here's some of the process of the background from the storyboard thumbnails till the finished art with character positioning to see if the styles worked together.
The Animatic and Sound Design
When i cleaned the tumbnail storyboards to make the Animatic i made some changes of where i would place some of the scenes to improve the flow of the story. With the boards cleaned I started playing around with sound, back then i wasn't too confident with music so i searched some songs that would work well with the film and asked around to their creators if I could use it for this project. I ended up using 'Staring at the Clock' by Steven O'brien who allowed me to use it for free.
Then i searched for sound effects that would work with the movement and feel of the animation, some of them i recorded my self and then added some audio effects to make it sound different to fit better with the scenes. And finally I recorded Cacá's thoughts at the end with my own voice, it was challenging to make this final statement, because there was so much i wanted to say but i was able to narrow it down to the theme: Respect.
The Animation
This was the HARDEST part hahah. I only had one animation class in my whole Design university course so it was a lot of researching and figuring out what i could do with the level of skill i had at that time. I used Photoshop animation timeline and did the rough pass, clean up and coloring on there. After i used Premiere and After Effects for the compositing and sound editing parts.
For the secondary characters i wanted their movements to be stiff since they were based on mannequins which don't have a lot of articulation. Even tho i did make them knees and elbows i wanted to maintain that stiffness.
