ABOUT

Which emotion am I most confident to illustrate? What kind of feeling is the most relatable to a wider audience? I wanted to make an animation that lots of people can associate to. To move someone’s mind, I first need to fully understand the sentiment that I wish to highlight. I am a mental health condition patient: I understand what it is like to live with the illness, which is not publicly talked about.

I decided to continue with the idea of the previous brief, Saturation Point: the hole in the heart. The hole can also be interpreted as a gap between the hearts, which gave me the idea of the storyboard. The storyboard above is illustrating an everyday adventure of a protagonist, however, the protagonist loses a part of his heart in a busy Underground and only notices the missing part when a child points it out while they are walking by with their parent. I wanted to visualise feet stepping on the gap between the train and the platform, which is a metaphor for the invention of the protagonist’s personal space. On the other hand, after a tutorial, I got some feedbacks that London Underground has a connotation of specific types of people, which goes against my aim to minimise the gap between the main figure and the audience by not specifying the gender and the ethnicity.

With the feedback, I chose to highlight the mundane life that anyone can relate to. The animation short focuses on the everyday life of the protagonist, however, I wanted to maximise the dragging and lonely feeling through the visuals and the sound effects. The boiling and the ticking sound added to the unstableness of the main character.