-I Should be Happy-

This was a class project for an original animation short. It was for my animation production class, and although it is not a narrative project for a game, I wanted to show an example of narrative design for a different medium. 

The main theme I wanted to explore was the invisibility of mental illnesses, but instead of showing the hopeful tale of a girl powering through her illness -as we usually find in media- or falling into the other extreme and giving it a fatalistic end, I wanted to gave the spectator a taste of what one day, just one day of living with depression could feel like. 

I was really happy with the result. 

I wanted to make it actual and simple. I wanted the world to be bright and hopeful. I wanted my characters to have easy lifes... and althogh, they would develop a mental illness. I wanted to make the spectator to actually ask themselves, "but why is she sad?". Because sometimes there isn't an actual reason and it is our brain not working as it should. This is something that someone who hasn't lived through a mental illness can't picture out, and my objective was to show them this was a realit, some have to live through every day of their lives. 

But how do you show an invisible illness? How do you make it clear? 

I came out with the idea of showing the illness as little creatures making Denise's life difficult. They wouldn't be visible for the cast, they  only see the consecuences of the creatures actions, but the espectator would see them constantly. 

Denise was the main character, high-school girl with a peaceful life. She has friends, good grades and a caring family, but she is not happy. Everyone thinks she should be, even Denise believes so, but something isn't working.  Denise has depression. 

The story follows Denise on one day of her life while constantly battling with her illness, without knowing she is powering through it as best as she could. 

The rest of the cast would be just normal people with small little problems if any and completly oblivious to the turmoil in the main character mind. 

There are a lot of animation techniques out there, so it was kind of a challenge to decide on one. 

At the beginning wanted to go for a live action with animation over it, with live footage of the caracters and simple animations that reflected the main character emotional state. 

Then, I came up with the idea of the little monsters representing the mental illness, but it would be really difficult to implement, I would need to learn to make the monsters coherent with the environment and I would need actors who would know how pretend that they had little creatures around... too difficult for me at the time. 

That's when I learnt about rotoscoped films. "That's it!", I thought. I could make the live footage with little plushies for the creatures with ropes and sticks... The shots would have the correct ilumination and layout. And then, we could retrace the whole frame and have a complete animation. 

This project was developted in my first year of the vocational training, so, the script and storyboard could be highly improved. 

I think, if I had to redo averything, I would rewrite the script to make it more concise, with less settings and more short meaningful interactions between the characters. Also, for the storyboard, I would cut free stock photos to layout the shots and draw over them to get the rotoscoped feeling. And finally, I would try to make an animatic -even if I have to make funny voices- to see if my idea actually works.