Awakening

Final:

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11/9

Assignment:

• In teams of two (or three), over the next three weeks you will create a short animation in After Effects that has a primary character and tells a story in 1-3 minutes. The animation will be due in Week 5. 

• For next week, develop a storyboard for your After Effects animation. Post the  storyboard to your documentation site and be prepared to present it in class.

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Process:

I paired up with Jezzy Lu for this project. She was feeling inspired about Victorian Era aesthetics, and I wondered how we could relate a Victorian street scene to the world of data and Digimon. We met for a storyboarding session and came up with a loose outline for a scene:

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Mary, the protagonist (a Victorian woman fashioned after Mary Wollstonecraft), walks onto a bustling street, steps into the street to avoid an approaching sidewalk crowd, narrowly misses getting hit by a horse buggy, and comes upon a boy selling matches on the opposite sidewalk (which triggers a first "data glitch"). She buys one and lights a cigarette. As she flicks the match into the street, another data glitch transitions the scene into darkness except for a street lamp, Mary, and her shadow along the sidewalk behind her. A strange creature reminiscent of a Shinigami or Chrysalimon rises up out of her shadow and whispers variations on the narrator's description of Edna's search for purpose in the The Awakening. Mary responds with variations of some of Edna's inner dialogue from the book. The scene then transitions into a full display of the "data world" and the paths between past, present, and future available to Mary with her expanded sense of freedom. The world begins to re-crystallize as Mary walks ahead and chooses a direction for her fate.

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We're not too sure on the conclusion of the piece yet, which we will work out further as we begin to sketch out the actual animation (hence the "?" in the last frame of the storyboard).

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A Google Doc with links to research and references that came up along the way:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pV0GN3vyJajsKHVGStFb__DgwqhjnbyPj3lz86h9vcc/edit?usp=sharing

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A Pinterest moodboard (we'll likely pull a good amount of our 2D assets from this):

https://www.pinterest.com/lucaswozniak/animation-2d-afx-project/

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The storyboard:

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