Farewell Project
Ideas for what a statue might look like in a Teddy Bear Warrior society.
Iteration 2
Iteration 3
Iteration 4
Iteration 5
Pre-production work and storyboards that I did for the short animated project "Farewell".
The initial pitch for this project was a 20 second short about anti-war story of a teddy bear warrior rejecting the ideals of his warror society. Iteration 1 shows the teddy bear approaching a monument of his war society, reflecting on his past in the reflection of his blade, and then leaving his sword and old life behind. We struggled with how to metaphorically portray a teddy bear warrior society through a monument statue, and after many statue iterations we eventually realized this idea was very hard to get across in a short amount of time.
Iterations 2 and 3 took an approach that stepped away from the idea of a teddy bear warrior society, and leaned more towards a metaphor for a soldier coming home from battle, and leaving old life behind him. This metaphor was tied to the idea of a bear hibernating for winter, and with idea of the first snowflake falling that signaled the change of seasons, so too must the bear change his ways and lifestyle. This idea also had many issues however, and we wondered if instead of leaving a sword behind at a stump, if a gravesite might make more sense. However, our team was still struggling with having this idea work in 20 seconds.
Iteration 4 was my team's idea to change locations, and have the story take place on a battlefield where the teddy bear soldier finds the body and sword of a fallen comrade, and leaves his own sword behind as a tribute and to signal that he is leaving the war. Eventually though, after many more iterations, my team realized that a reason this idea may not be working or connecting with the audience is that we were straying too far into metaphors, and if we wanted to drive home our anti-war message we should get much more literal and direct.
Iteration 5 is a reflection of this realization. We scrapped the idea of a teddy bear warrior, and had our teddy bear lead exist amidst the rubble of an actual air-raid, searching for his owner amongst the chaos. The short ends with the bear finding the small mitten of his owner under the rubble, and ends with a shot that reveals the full destruction and aftermath of the war.
This process really showed me how different stories can become through multiple iterations, although it is almosty always for the better. It was so fun to create these different storyboards that constantly refined and reshaped the narrative for the better, and seeing the final product come to life.
Here is a link to the final product and short for this project!
Robot in Space Project
Storyboard Iteration 1
Storyboard Iteration 2
Storyboard Iteration 3
Storyboard Iteration 4
A storyboard project I did that used the theme of a lonely robot in space finding/creating a friend for himself. These three iterations show the story development process I went through as I refined the idea for the story, setting, and theme.
Iteration 1 follows the idea of a robot alone on a space station, that finds a toy abandoned on the station like himself. The issue with this iteration was that the story was a bit hard to follow without background context on why the robot was there alone, and the story was also a bit static and uninteresting to view.
Iteration 2 has the robot in a workshop, being more dynamic and moving in and out of frame while actually building the friend, however the reason why the robot was building the friend (due to loneliness) didn't quite read well, and the theme of being on a space station was also lost.
Iteration 3 returned the robot to the setting of a space station, and added a motivating event for why he was rushing to build a friend: the idea that the space station was self-destructing and he did not want to die alone.
Iteration 4 builds upon the previous one by keeping the same idea and setting, as well as catalyst event. However, it contains the robot to a single location on the space ship and has more dynamic movements of the robot moving in and out of frame like in Iteration 2. I also added words that show the voiceover of the ship destructing, for audio cues about what is happening in the scene.