Promotional poster for the animation.
A story of an unlikely friendship between an introverted Artist and an extroverted Tiger, in which the Artist slowly steps out of her own little world into reality.
This started as a group assignment for an animation pre-production module which carried on to become a solo final year project in 2011. By 2012, I managed to see it through to the final renders and it was successfully screened at Bugis+ Filmgarde, along with the other completed graduation projects. It went on to clinch a student prize in 14th TBS Digicon6 (Singapore) and I found myself with a new wacom tablet :D It was a pretty personal work, the processes were also collected in a blog here if anyone is interested: https://playwimme.wordpress.com/
The story opens with an artist observing her surroundings and painting away in her comfort zone. The world reveals to be occupied by queer looking inhabitants, going about their own interactions.
The artist observing her surroundings of the inhabitants in an imaginary world.
She is soon spotted by a cheerful Tigress, who seems to be looking for another like-minded person to play badminton with.
The Tigress enters, disappointed time and again that no one is interested in a friendly game.
The latter tries to convince the first to join her in the sport through her own ways. As the animation progresses, we see how the Tigress manages to communicate her point to the Artist, who later steps out of her own imagination and views the world as it is.
Above are the early concept artworks of the animation, done during the pre-production module. A few styles were explored, but didn't move away from the painterly idea (the establishment of the Artist's imaginary world).
Character design and turnabouts. Kept things simple (partially for a better life... :p)
The greatest challenge at the start was finding the final look of the animation. It took quite a number of tries to find a style that is achievable in the available time and resource while still keeping the painterly look. Some research led me to a software called TVPaint. It was quite popular among the other Asian student projects at that time and after some experimenting, I decided on using it for the animation.
From left to right: The rough lines, ink to shading and color in TVPaint, and the final look after compositing with After Effects. It took me a few months to get used to the production method and the project thoroughly challenged my time-management and organizational skills.
Composited render of Shot 05. The backgrounds for the animation were created using watercolors.
Below are some screenshots from the animated short.
Needed a branding for the project, so explored some designs for its logo. The earlier ideas had too much emphasis on the Tigress, which shouldn't be as the whole animation was set around the artist. Took quite sometime before settling on the final design.
...and I created a photobook of the animation process for gradshow back then. It wasn't necessary, but it was probably the best thing I've ever done to wrap up this project. Looking back at the animation after 6 years, despite my current eyes catching its obvious flaws... it still has its own charm (or at least to me :) ).