Evolve

Senior Thesis

Concept

Design

Animation

CHALLENGE

This is my motion design senior thesis that shows a clear and sophisticated sequence of events that are engaging to watch or to “Evoke” an emotion from our audience.

For my Senior thesis, Evolve is an animated film about showcasing the highs and lows of one’s life in reflection, and trying to cope with it by staying strong and positive.

Concept

My thesis is a personal story, expressing the transformative inner feelings that not many people see. Then the transformation is based on failures and successes. While creating this piece took inspiration from the quote by Ernest Hemingway from his novel, A Farewell To Arms. “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places”, while reflecting on experiences in my life, highs and lows, and how moments transform you into who we are.

The quote speaks to the universal nature of challenge and adversity; everyone faces moments that test them. It is often through these very challenges that deeper strength, insight, and resilience are forged. This reflects many people, and significantly more my generation.

Additionally, I wanted to represent auditory processing disorder visually, something I struggled with and has affected my communication with people and being social as a whole. The only escape from it was in my art and animation and I used it as a way to express my feelings and to commute.

The idea of someone being in pieces and trying to pull themselves together, showing the impacts of all thoughts and feelings, internally and externally. The pure essence of being a feeling and thinking human is what intrigued me into telling and exploring this in my thesis.

Idea: A person trying to believe in themselves, but is stuck with self doubt due to reflection. (the mistakes, bad moments mixed with good thoughts) Seeing through someone's reflection, inner feelings of oneself as a complicated person. Being in pieces and trying to hold themselves together.

Emotion Theme: tense + impactful/sadness x happy = meaningful.

Emotion Moral: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” - Ernest Hemingway

Senario: person + mirror = torn apart from certain moments: happiness, positivity, mistakes, failure, and issues in their life aside from goodness (judgement, fear and self-doubts), while maintaining their good side.

Mapped out story ideas with notes, story archetypes and breakdown for Evolve.

Before the project started, I quickly sketched a rough early explorational story archetype structures for my thesis from an early idea I had in mind.

Pre-production

EXPERIMENTAL ALTERNATIVE ANIMATIONS

The objective of experimental is to create a few potential design style options for Evoke.

ANIMATION EXPERIMENT 01

The first experimental animation I chose to do cel animation with an organic watercolor/hand made approach experimenting with color and scale. Created in Adobe Photoshop.

ANIMATION EXPERIMENT 02

Second is another cel animation but experimenting with vibrant colors and abstract art in a hand painted medium. Created in Adobe Photoshop.

ANIMATION EXPERIMENT 03

My final experiment is a collage style of 2D and 3D designs, inspired by the works of Tom McCarten. This design style was very successful as it supported the story for my thesis in terms of color, it encourage me to go fully abstract in the visuals. Statue created with Cinema 4D and animated in Adobe After Effects.

Initial Approach | Storyboards

Pre-production was a difficult process for this project, it requires not only designed to be understood by an audience but it encourages to visually show something familiar but different at the same time. Throughout the storyboard and animatic phases of development, these two early failed passes were too obvious, difficult, literal, and overall unclear to execute.

The biggest challenge for my thesis was how do you show or recapture both the inner and outer human feelings both positive and negative, into a interesting and compelling visual that’s different but also similar from the ordinary. Little did I know, that it will soon hit me that everything shown had to come together and visually think more outside of the box than I’ve ever done before.

Storyboard Ver 1

Storyboard Ver 2

Redevelopment Sketches

Before I begin restarting the visuals for my thesis and storyboards, I decided to sketch and write out notes, ideas, and plans in my notebook to figure out how to execute the story visually interesting than before. I wanted the each icon, moments, and key objects to have a symbolic meaning that visually represents the moral and the quote for the story. Eventually most of my sketches and ideas would ended up what my thesis look like in the end.

Animatic

After going through visual storyboard changes and design changes, I’ve created an storyboard animatic of my thesis that became the structural blueprint for both pacing, timing, and for animating portions in 2D and 3D.

With visual abstract inspirations from the works of Tom McCarten and Henri Matisse known for his cut outs.

Styleframes

To make the designs and animation work, I created three style frames in After Effects for the transformation at the story’s climax. The approach for the statue with the sphere representing the person’s collective mind of memories, was to do a realistic stylize 2D and 3D collage.

The final design style was inspired by the works of both Tom McCarten and Henri Matisse, as well as the new/current DreamWorks Animation intro since 2022.

Initial Styleframes

Final

Modeling

One of the biggest chances I took was modeling the entire Atlas statue model using Maxon’s ZBrush program on the iPad for the first time. The purpose of the statue is to show the outside after affects of the positive and negative traits of being human. Once again taking the inner and outer emotional feelings of being human, making it an abstract symbolic interpretation of it.

Animation Process

Most of the animation was done entirely in Adobe After Effects for the 2D visuals animated by path, masking, and 3D camera animation techniques. With my style frame After Effects file, I was able to use the styleframes and recreate certain portions, especially the strong glowing figure emerging out of the statue with vector shapes, masking and other effects to made it feel like a 2D hand animated piece.

Portions of the 3D stills and animations were done in Cinema 4D/Redshift to create a fully collage visual once again based off the works of Motion Designer, Tom McCarten and the cut out artworks by Henri Matisse.