Droopy
Glasses
About Me
Day Dreams
Capstone Project
Year - 2025
Project Background
Life is incredibly fragile. We never know when someone we love will be gone. I felt the weight of that truth the day I found out my mother lost her battle to cancer. Being only 15, all I wanted to do was to escape. To leave behind the life I knew and find another one. A Happier one.
The years that followed, I withdrew into my own mind. I escaped through creativity, through chasing dreams far from reality. I disconnected from people around me, damaging relationships to protect myself from more pain.
Over time, I found my way back. I rebuilt what I had broken and learnt to appreciate the life I still had. This project is about that journey. How escapism was my way to cope with grief. It explores the ways people retreat into imagination, passion, or fantasy not to avoid reality, but to survive it.
Visual Development
During the early days of this project, I was experimenting with a very different theme. I still was exploring escapism and how it related to the struggles of being autistic. However, due to a lack of depth in the story I wanted to tell, I pivoted the project to instead be about my struggles with grief and how I used escapism to work through it.
The visual style of Day Dreams reflect the themes around escapism through it’s colour palette and stylised visuals.
I explored using a variety of blues, purples and neon colours to reflect the child-like safety that escapism provides. These colours are known to deliver the feeling of calm and peace, articulating the refuge that Kit experiences during these segments.
Character Designs
As visual development continued, the character designs came naturally. The characters are a reflection my own relationship with my deceased mother and how my younger self would seek out maternal relationships to fill in that hole she left. This personality is reflected in Kit’s shape language and demeanor.
Using predominantly rectangular and oversized clothing, I wanted kit to feel closed off and anxious. A similar pipeline was used when designing “Mum” as well. Her design is very intentional in it’s lack of personality as she isn’t Kit’s real mother and someone simply posing as her. This can be seen in her lack of eyes as eyes are a core trait in portraying emotion and she lacks this being a figment of Kit’s escapist fantasy. I also designed her hospital gown for the reveal in the end of the bargaining stage.
Initial Boards
Storyboards have always been a struggle of mine, but it was especially tiresome for a project of this caliber. Whilst, still completing visual development and finding the narrative structure. I went through many variations before settling on what felt right.
As originally, this project was meant to set in a dream and the struggle of keeping up in a classroom setting. This later changed to follow three stages of grief. Denial, bargaining and withdrawal. However, the idea behind these boards remained largely the same with additional revisions made later on.
Final Boards
With the initial failure, I went back to the drawing boards and added the necessary depth to further my narrative development. Using the stages of grief, I discovered the vital depth that was missing from this project.
With my visual development in mind, I illustrated a variety of scenes for the live action and animated segments for this project. The shot choreography designed to enhance the character’s emotions and put an emphasis on the contrast of the two situations.
Styleframes
Using the aid of my initial visual development, I adapted some of my storyboards into styleframes that would be used as future reference during my production process.
I found designing these very helpful as apart of my pipeline as they allowed me to fully develop my framework and finalise my workflow.
Film Production
With the framework complete, I moved onto filming this project. We ran into a few road blocks. Leaving us to change the setting to better align with the restrictions I faced. This caused the short to take place in my home, rather than a classroom situation.
This change in setting was beneficial as it provided creative freedom in it’s location and shots I could create.
Using the storyboards as a guide, I filmed a variety of shots. I found this process quite interesting as was a different work flow to what I was used to when illustrating my works. After filming was completed, I further enhanced the shots in after effects with colour grading tools.
2D Animation
My 2D animation pipeline is monotonous in that It’s continually refining previous passes and making the animation cleaner throughout each pass. I find this process quite interesting as seeing my work evolve as the project continues to grow with me.
I found difficulty with finding the right program for me. As I have very little prior experience with a fully cel animation project like this.
Translating my rough storyboards into animation was an engaging experience for me as I slowly put what was moving in my head into reality. Through this project I’ve gained a better understanding of what 2D animation entails and the importance of keeping it alive.
Post-Production
The final stage of refinement. Adding the necessary final touches to deem this project finished. This stage includes adjusting the colours, camera movement for the animation, compositing and most importantly, sound design.
This part of the project is extremely important as it can make or break months of work because of it’s quality. This project’s post-production is simple and includes touch ups and sound design. I find these two elements enhance my project and bring it all together.