An animated 2D short centering around Jordan West, a young adult who,
after facing homophobic microaggressions, receives validation
and affirmation from a reality-bending entity.
FINAL PRODUCT - PARTIAL ANIMATIC
PRODUCTION
This section includes elements of the production process for valid., including the demo song and storyboards that were compiled in After Effects to create the video (see above).
Demo Track
This demo track, which is featured in valid., was written and composed by Zachary Thomsen. The music track was initially drafted on piano before being brought into Ableton and fleshed out into a fuller track. The lyrics were inspired by several affirmations, as well as pop culture references, which can be seen in the Research section further down on this page.
I wanted this track to be playful yet intriguing, so I pulled a lot of influence from 80's and 90's music, including the song Vogue by Madonna. This vision affected my instrument choice - I spent a long time going through and selecting the instruments that I wanted.
valid. Demo Track
Storyboards
In order to flesh out the visual direction of valid., I first needed to create storyboards of the various scenes, which included narrative and character direction. The characters were based on the ones created during pre-production, which can be seen further down in the document.
The storyboards were drawn in Procreate, exported as .png files, and imported into Adobe After Effects. Once in After Effects, the boards were timed in a way that imbued them with a sense of narrative flow. After the boards were timed, sound effects were taken from Pixabay, imported into After Effects, and placed in time with the storyboards. The final product of this effort is the video at the top of this page.
PRE-PRODUCTION
This section includes elements of the pre-production process for valid.,
including the story treatment and model sheets. These were created to help guide the creative vision of the overall process, as well as guiding future technical endeavors (like animation). The text-based assets were created in Google Docs and the visual assets were drawn in Procreate.
