​Introduction

What makes us humans? What is a perfect human? Is it possible? This project asks a social commentary question about how people are affected by societal expectations in the sense of self worth. Through a 2D animation this project hope to aim to have a greater insight of this problem of question of our current state of society.

Literature Review

The greatest artistic influence of this project comes from various Eastern animators and animation studios, this includes Kyoto Animations, the studio behind Violet Evergardens, Kyobayashi's Dragon Maid, Hyouka, etc., and Hiromatsu Shu, a freelance animator who worked on Chainsaw Man Ending 5, and various scenes of Jujutsu Kaisen. These were the main inspirations for how to animate certain shots or on how shots are composed to give various different feelings. In other words, they were used as a basis for the techniques that was going to be applying to the project. But the main inspiration for this project is Eve, a Japanese song composer and singer who has many of his songs created with fully animated 2D animations. The songs that I used mainly for reference from him are Living idly and dying as if dreaming and Fight Song. As Living idly and dying as if dreaming is similar in tone of what the project wanted to achieve. This project wanted to see how it was possible to replicate their style and techniques to be put into the animation.

Another type of influence that was outside of the main artistic influences is the scholar influence, which mainly consisted of Disney's textbook called Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life by Thomas, F. This textbook despite its age, has many good information of 2D animation techniques and breaks it down into step by step on how the techniques works. Another source that was used quite a bit was Mayo Institute to see if there were any missing parts of the general gist of mental disorders that are related to my topics and see how it compares to my own and my peers experiences. What I found is that there were many things that it was not explicitly mentioned within the peer reviewed journals articles that was found and there were many nuances that aimed at the same ideas of the project that maybe were harder to be put into words and studied upon. These articles talked about many different potential reasoning of how it could cause depression and dissociation towards oneself but not many had resources on what it's like on a day-by-day basis.

Methods

The main research method was trying to figure out how certain technique works as such it was possible to put them into the project in the future and then plan ahead of what I wanted to do by storyboarding the entirety of the 2D animation. This way I was able to prototype out a semi workable animation (some of these pages of storyboards are on the creative process page). During research I watched many of these movies and animations with friends to see how certain parts works, albeit certain parts were rewatched it all over again to get a better frame by frame analysis. 

This also lead to the initial research of what program(s) should be used, Clip Studio or Procreate, since at the time of deciding the program, Procreate Dream hasn't came out and so it was changed after Procreate Dream came out as unlike the other two options, it directly supported animations. The main issue that encounted during this process was that Procreate Dream was a newly came out program that didn't have many of the functions that Procreate itself innately had. Thus the decision was made to create the keyframes in Procreate and in-betweens/timeline is made in Procreate Dream.

Audience & Impact

The main target audience of this project was people who are participating in Art Fest and people who may not understand to be under pressure from societal expectations. Everyone lives their own lives and they all experience different things that others cannot speak of themselves completely. This project aims to be one of those lenses but through one of the project created original characters. The reasoning of this project's existence is to spread awareness of this issue of impractical societal expectations because it is something that many might find it hard to talk about because of how personal it can get for some people as well as it is hard to put vague experiences into confident words that everyone can understand. If the people viewing the project already understand such feelings then it is there to give them a new perspective from another person and see how much it correlates with their own experiences.

The main takeaways that the project had given me as an artist is that could’ve controlled the timing of the project better to create more of the original project.  It was fun even with many rough patches especially when the entire year we were able to see each other's project come to fruition and it was fun seeing everyone’s projects coming to fruition at Art Fest. Generally speaking the project gave a much greater appreciation for animation since it proved that it was a difficult task where many people are involved in order to produce high quality animations (even the ones that are only a couple minutes long for MVs) were needed. If were given the chance to do this project again, there would be changes to the original plan to make it much more feasible to create within a timely manner.

References

12 principles of Animation | Basic Animation principles | adobe. (n.d.). https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/animation/discover/principles-of-animation.html 

Kanazaki Iori. (2017).命に嫌われている。. YouTube. Retrieved October 31, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HYm60Mjm0k. 

Kelemen, M., Surman, E., & Dikomitis, L. (2018). Cultural Animation in health research: An innovative methodology for patient and public involvement and engagement. Health Expectations, 21(4), 805–813. https://doi.org/10.1111/hex.12677 

Kyuufu. (2017). 猛独が襲う YouTube. Retrieved October 31, 2023, from https://youtu.be/3Mgfv-kYc10. 

(2022, May 17). How many frames per second in animation. Animost Studio. https://animost.com/tutorials/how-many-frames-per-second-in-animation-and-other-medium/

Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research. (2022, October 14). Depression (major depressive disorder). Mayo Clinic. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/symptoms-causes/syc-20356007 

MediLexicon International. (n.d.). Emotional distress: What are the causes and symptoms?. Medical News Today. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/emotional-distress#causes 

Professional, C. C. medical. (n.d.). Emotional stress: Warning signs, management, when to get help. Cleveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/6406-emotional-stress-warning-signs-management-when-to-get-help 

Start-to-finish storyboarding. Berkeley Advanced Media Institute. (2022, April 4). https://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/start-to-finish-storyboarding/

SURVEY METHODS. Survey methods. (n.d.). https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~pbawa/421/SURVEY%20METHODS.htm 

Thomas, F. (1988). Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. Abbeville Press Inc, U S. 

Ual. (2023, July 4). Top 5 types of animation styles. UAL. https://www.arts.ac.uk/study-at-ual/short-courses/stories/top-5-types-of-animation-styles 

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (n.d.). Depression. National Institute of Mental Health. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/depression  

Warning signs and risk factors for emotional distress. SAMHSA. (n.d.-a). https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/disaster-distress-helpline/warning-signs-risk-factors 

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the Art Scholars Staff Team: Harold, Alex, Heather