Carmela

September 2019

Frame-by-Frame Animation

Project Overview

Carmela is a frame by frame animation created purely by hand in Adobe Illustrator. This is my first attempt to use AI to draw animation works, from the idea, storyboard, dubbing to the final painting is a very difficult work, but I successfully completed it. This frame-by-frame animation tells the story of Carmela from the elf world and the man from the human world exchanging worlds. Carmela is tired of the boredom of the fairy world, while the man is tired of the sophistication of the human world.

Through a chance coincidence, they exchanged the world, and after calling the world they found themselves unable to adapt to the other side of the world, but everything has been unable to go back.

Concept

When I first conceived this work, my idea was that every picture or most of the pictures in the frame by frame animation would be dynamic, which would be transferred to the next picture through well-designed transitions. However, it was not implemented in the end because of the heavy workload. In the early stage of creation, I wanted to express the pressure of work and the annoying worldly wisdom in Chinese society through a work. At the same time, I wanted to try some new ways of expressing myself. I came up with this idea when I was watching an anime, creating two worlds and two protagonists, and subtly expressing my point of view through their role interchange.

So I designed Carmela, a scheming elf, and a normal human man. The difficulty in the creation of this work lies in how to make the protagonists interact with each other, and how to make the audience fully understand the theme it wants to express. Based on these problems, I finally adopted the style of fairy tales and the consistent storyline to present this work. In the story, I added a book that could travel through the world so that the two protagonists could interact. At the same time, I added a male voice narration to make the audience more clear what I wanted to express. In this work, Carmela and men do not have the concept of good or bad, they just want to get their ideal goal. And I added an obscure concept at the end of the story. Did Carmela make men trapped in a fairy tale world? It’s not impossible for Carmela to do this with her magic. Maybe she’ll just get tired of the human world and open the portal again.

Moodboard

Another difficulty with this piece was that I had to create two worlds.This needs to fully show the differences between the two worlds. The method I used is to use different painting styles to represent the spirit world and the human world. In the Sprite world, I use bright and saturated colors. At the same time, I also try to use rounded lines to describe the objects and characters in the spirit world. In the human world, I use a grayish color. At the same time, it also gives most of the buildings an angular feeling.

Main Character

Storyboard Text

Storyboard

Workflow

Color Palette

Final Scenes