Song Credit: Twin Peaks Theme by Angelo Badalamenti
Styleframes
Overall description
Change represents the most serene yet foreboding feelings I had throughout the year of 2020. What I realized was how much life can change very quickly. While the world around me seemed to be burning down with a crashing economy, a worldwide pandemic, people being shut in and restless for months, inner social conflicts, and an odd event happening for practically every month of that year, I found myself calm in the midst of this chaos. The Twin Peaks Theme, which serves as the project’s soundtrack, expresses that calmness I had; I also watched the show during the lockdown. This project introduces a new form of change to how I make my projects and that’s by being the first collage style motion graphic project I would make. The characters, Cecil and his dog, travel around a forest, get lost in it, and ultimately come to harm at the end. This character represented how I felt lost during this time and being uncertain as to what would happen in the coming months. All of the imagery and illustration came naturally to me because it’s how I felt during the creation of this project. I had lost my dog, Lexie, months earlier, and I wanted to include her in my work in some shape or form.
Planning + Process
I started out with creating sketches for the project in my sketchbook and going through a few different ideas for the theme of things changing. For instance, I was going to have Cecil have a load of garbage on his back that acted as an over-the-top hunch on his back. As he kept moving forward, he would reach a town that glowed gold and by then his hunch would be gone. However, I did not have enough time to go with that original story and ending so I changed it to be more sinister instead. In hindsight, I think the ending I switched to was a bit more accurate to the overall tones of 2020 that not even Cecil was free from the chaos and harm of changing.
When I started to work on my styleframes, I wanted to do a style of motion graphics that I haven’t done before. I had already done live action, vector shapes, and kinetic typography at that point. So, I chose to go for the same route as the Metamorphosis title sequence except I made the imagery I sampled a lot more collage-like in the same style of Dada artwork. Once I made my first styleframe, I was really satisfied with it and I chose to go in that style direction or mixing illustration with collage.
Initial storyboard
work in progress screenshots
