A story about Covid-19
Our assignment was to tell a personal story about our experience with covid-19 for a collaboration with the National Museum of Denmark.
I worked out pretty quickly that I wanted to work with something about escaping reality as I did that (along with the rest of the worlds population probably) by watching tv and films, reading books and scrolling through a lot of social media. After conferring with my teacher I decided to focus on my cat as well, as she was a big part of keeping me sane during lockdowns.
The final video
I searched for inspiration and remembered a shot film called "Spaces" by Nora Štrbová which had a handdrawn style that I really liked. I took a lot of inspiration from that and also from movies like "Wolfwalkers" and "Song of the Sea" by Cartoon Saloon when thinking about how to show the "magical" aspect.
I chose a few blue, grey-ish colors that I associated with covid as all information in Denmark about covid was on a blue background. For the magical aspect, as well as to create contrast with the blue colors, I chose two yellow/orange hues that reminded me of gold.
For my storyboard I wanted to try to work with different cropping of the character as well as using many shots where the viewer gets really close and sees their emotions. I also worked with tilted angles on frames where the character was in a bad headspace.
I had decided to make the animation by using frame-by-frame, which meant I had a lot of work to do, so I tried to find ways to make it as manageable for myself as possible. I decided to make the "magical reality" background in After Effects because I didn't have the time to draw the animations I had originally wanted as seen in my styleframes below.
To make everything easier to keep track of, I made a lot of lists so I knew how far I'd gotten. I'd made a animatic which helped me to figure out how long each scene had to be, which made it so much easier when I had to draw the frame in Photoshop.
Despite all my planning, I still got a bit stressed out towards the end of the project because I always forget how long it actually takes to do frame by frame animation.
For this project we also had to work with sound more than we had before which was really interesting. So I worked in Adobe Audition for the first time, which was luckily very user-friendly. Sound design is definitely something I want to focus on in my future projects.
