Going through old files...

I rediscovered these guys as I was backing up my laptop. This was the first sketch for the men from 'Remedy.' I thought they looked awesome in this style, but with just five days to animate the entire thing, I had to make some cutbacks. Maybe I'll revisit this motif someday...

 

Senior Thesis Animation 1 - Remedy

The Remedios illustrations led to this. I simplified the story and took out some major characters, just to streamline the process and make it less of a literal interpretation. And the art style became a little messier and more gestural than in my original illustrations.

I wasn't sure how it would be received in critique. It's bright, colorful, and bouncy... everything the book isn't. Would it be 'artsy' enough? I mean, animating a naked lady should give me some artsy points, right?

They liked it a lot more than I thought they would. :)

51 seconds, 5 days.
Animated in Flash, each frame painted in Photoshop.
Lute music from freesound.org.

Remedy - Illustrations and Sketches

Our first project for senior thesis was inspired by Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. We read it during the summer and had to incorporate some sort of theme/character/scene from the book into our first project.

It's such a dark and unhappy book... so I used happy and bright colors for my illustrations. Makes sense to me!

I decided to focus on the story of one character, Remedios the Beauty. She's the most beautiful woman in her town, probably in the whole world, and just being in her presence makes men go nuts. She's incredibly naïve, though, and doesn't realize the power she has. She doesn't care about social conventions — she runs around naked because she hates clothing, she cuts her hair so she doesn't have to comb it every day, and she uses her excrement to paint little animals on the wall in her house. She's a bit of a wild child, and that makes her even more tantalizing to the opposite sex.

One day, without any warning, she is lifted up into the sky along with the laundry, never to be seen again. Maybe heaven wanted her back?

I first thought I wouldn't have enough time to do an animation based on this art style. I had just come back from the Ottawa International Animation Festival and had less than two weeks to animate something. I was going to keep it to just a series of illustrations, and that would be fine.

...Couldn't resist. I did an animation in five days!