island girl

ANIMATION / 2023 / TOOLS: PROCREATE, ADOBE PHOTOSHOP, PREMIERE

As a project for the self-paced animation course “Mixed Media Animation in Procreate” by Caroline Kjellberg, I wanted to create an animation that reflected my internal dialogue at the time. I combined a selfie with an animation that I drew frame-by-frame in Procreate and completed in Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. This project took about a week to complete.

Below is the breakdown of my process of creating this animation.

BEHIND THE IMAGE

island girl, island of a girl 🌴🌊

"here i was chillin', dressed as gogo yubari for halloween, waiting for past midnight cuz that's when everyone goes out in spain 😴 i thought about how it's nice to hang out with friends again... but for the years i've been here, it's been hard to find kindred spirits. people i could have a heart-to-heart with. the language barrier would sneak up badly some days when i didn't have the energy or had a bad night's sleep. they wouldn't get what i say, i can't say what i wanna say, they don't want to try hard for simple conversation (which i understand), or they assume i said something wrong when i've said it correctly. a messy situation. sometimes i feel like i'm lost, embarrassing myself. loneliness is a huge part of learning a language in its country, it takes time. so does finding friends that you can connect with."


BRAINSTORM / MOODBOARD The first step was to create a brainstorm for the animation concept, using a word cloud that best described my emotions towards being an ex-pat in Spain. I then listed themes from that word cloud and imagery with symbolism. From that, I made a story that molded the themes and imagery, creating the idea that I was an isolated island of a girl. I combined images to create a moodboard for inspiration on how the water and fish would look, and chose a color palette that was lo-fi inspired for a chill, bedroom feel.
STORYBOARD Next, I drew a 6-part storyboard of water rushing in, surrounding my face to create an island, and fish swimming in and out of frame. An element to marry the still image and the animation, which I decided on later in the process, is when one of the fishes kisses my face.
ROUGH SKETCH Using Procreate, I sketched a rough draft of the animation, using animation principles such as easing, pose-to-pose, arcs, staging, timing, weight (the heaviness of the water, the lightness of the fish), and appeal. I researched how water and fish moved to make my animation accurate. The sub-animations of the fish and the water were made separately and combined to create a composition in Adobe After Effects. I keyframed the animations for consistency, smoothed out transitions, and added more frames to make the animation longer and more complete (i.e. repeating water frames to give fish more screentime).
FINAL DRAFT The final stage was to draw, color, and polish the sub-animations, which I did frame-by-frame in Procreate. I imported the sub-animations again into After Effects to make an accurate and smooth composition, and the result was a fun, 6-second visual story of complicated feelings as an ex-pat abroad for 4 years!