Art Director
Art Director
ROLES:
Art Direction/Storyboarding/Illustrating/Branding/Animation Directing
TOTAL STAFF:
1-3 people
PROJECT LENGTH:
1-2 weeks
Nominated for a 2019 Webby for Culture and Lifestyle.
I Decided is a thus far 6 episode series where we spoke to people and had them tell their stories about a trying time in their life—whether around sexual assault or addiction— when they at some point needed to make a choice to live and to fight. We didn’t want to compromise on the authenticity of these stories or the quality of the visuals that would be representing them. We decided to take on the ambitious task of both creating a high-quality docuseries alongside animation that would aptly represent these passionate subjects and their stories— the catch? We had a very short staff, a tight production schedule and a hard air-date.
Though in the premiere episode I had to be the Art Director, Storyboard Artist and Animation director, we were extremely proud of the result and ended up being nominated for a Webby for it and it has about 93K views on Youtube. I have also embedded this episode at the bottom of the page.
Here you’ll find the process I took as Art Director and storyboard artist; in the animation sequence I’m showcasing, I was luckily able to work with an excellent, hard working illustrator and animator (Augi and Bam, respectively) who helped us bring the story to life. Apart from the actual production, I created the animation style and branding for the series, which you’ll also see below.
All visuals/video copyright WildSkyMedia 2019
These are some pages out of the style guide that defined the art-style of the show we aimed to create; I went for simple but expressive. It had to be able to communicate deeply disturbing themes while not delving too hard into them, as the point of the series was recovery and strength. It had to have almost a memory-like quality to it. Furthermore, from a practical standpoint, It had to be something we could create as a team of 1-3 people in a 1-2 week period of time.
I storyboarded this scene for the episode roughly. The scene was about our subject, Reema, presenting inappropriate letters from her teacher to her principal at her school; her realizing that he wouldn’t help her and worse— he was friends with the culprit. The man she thought would keep her safe was in fact protecting the monster she was trying to get away from.
Our workflow was Storyboard>Illustrator>Animator since our animator was really a motion graphics artist. Here you’ll find my sketches and direction both artistic and practical for the illustrator.
The tension in this scene was very important. The terror that she’s feeling, the BIGness of the room she’s in since she was all but a child— it all had to build. We had to see it from her perspective, so the direction had to be really tight. My motion graphics designer, though not a traditional character animator, did an excellent job.
And this is what it ultimately became. Note that in the original, this would have had both voice over and sound, but you can still feel the pacing and tension we aimed to create.
This was Tiffany Jenkins, our first episode, for which we received a Webby nomination. I was Art Director, Storyboard Artist, Illustrator, and Animation Director for this episode.