Got to collaborate with the very talented crew at Vox Media for a new episode of Vox Almanac titled: Baby cages.
Weird, right?
Had the pleasure to collaborate with Vox’s art director and animator Dion Lee to design and animate this quirky- funny -yet disturbing piece.
The main challenge was how to take historic images and make them “playful” and visually attractive without loosing the information.
So I started playing around with the idea of the collage. These are the boards at their earliest stage. Some of these changed to go with the audio and to help support the information at its best.
Some pieces that didn’t make it through
Had the pleasure to collaborate for a second video with the Vox team. This time the video was about how Leonardo da Vinci made a satellite map in 1502. Not only was this project fun and challenging but also got to learn so many interesting facts!
Got to work with the amazing team at Demo Duck animating Rohan McDonald’s illustrations for 826Chi, a non-profit organization that encourages young creatives to explore their creativity even further. This time we got to animate Izzy’s poem “She’Cago” .
Had the honor to collaborate with the guys at Ellipsis studios for some animations and illustrations about a cool project the scientists at CalTech University have been working on. Basically they developed a technology that could recognize plants and give you deep information about them. Talk about awesome!
You can read more about the project in here.
I was given some directions on what the colors and style should look like by the super talented designer Isabelle Souri and from them on I explored with different shapes and drawings to support the story.
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Black Behind the Ear is an animated visual representation of Elizabeth Acevedo’s poem “Hair”. This poem uses hair as a metaphorical element to represent the internalized racism and racial amnesia predominant in the Dominican Republic, a place that owes African slaves for much of the island’s racial, and cultural heritage.
Concept:
In 1833, one of the most well-known Dominican poet Juan Antonio Alix wrote the poem “El negro detrás de la oreja”. The poem became so influential that the title of the poem became a colloquialism meaning someone with the black behind its ear means that has an African ancestry but hides it.
The concept of this project was born from this phrase. This project embraces heritage rather than ignore it. It hopes to change “Black Behind the Ear” from an insult to a prideful descriptor, giving the audience an uplifting perspective of themselves.
Poem by: Elizabeth Acevedo
Process:
Throughout the making of Black Behind the Ear the visualization of the story along with its animation style changed from what was planned at the beginning. The first storyboard intended to be more abstract inspired by botanical shapes where everything would be symbolized to go along Elizabeth Acevedo’s voice.
While doing more research on the target audience and finding more cultural references the design shifted form to include more symbolic figures that would accurately express, the feelings and phrases within the poem. Keeping the abstract concept intact the visuals became more significant and deeper in meaning.
1st Storyboard
Previous style frame:
In the latest version, the visuals shifted from an abstract and delicate shapes to more aggressive symbols and representation of the words said in order to create an aggressive feel along with representing femininity in the Caribbean.
The style and transitions transitioned towards stop motion animation style and stylized shapes and textures. Making the piece have an “crafty, handmade look and feel” in order to represent the struggle the ancestors had to go through to fight for their rights.
Latest Storyboard:
Choosing the color group for Black Behind the Ear was one of the most important decisions made. During the first half of the piece, the girl is in denial because of what her past generations (represented by the mother in the poem) has taught her. This dark emotional stage where she tries to escape to her true self and is represented with colors reminiscent of nighttime. The colors are cold with the exception of the character’s hair to contrast with the darkness and to symbolize the strength of their heritage.
The second half comes as a sunrise to represent the awakening of the girl’s mind towards something being wrong, trying now to run from all the stereotypes and beauty standards her past has set on her and looking forward to become self-aware. This stage is mainly based on warm bright colors which usually are used for optimism, passion, aggressiveness and strength.
Animation & Texture
The main challenge for this entire project was the animation part, since it was the first time I tackled frame by frame animation with several illustrated details.
The first step was to animate the overall piece, then polish, and since the entire style was based on using chalk-like textures I had to go back and texturize every frame. At the end around 3,000 frames were uniquely worked on.
The audio version used for this project is a live voice recording of Elizabeth Acevedo by
www.SlamFind.com.
