A Half-Awake Animator

A Half-awake Animator is a 3-minute graphics-styled 2D animation. Portraying Willy, a representation of the author (William) who woke up from a nightmare dreamt invaded by a crocodile and felt anxious to remember from completing a crocodile animation assignment.

The story exaggerates from William’s personal experience. Reflecting on his time studying Media Arts undergraduate degree, and sometimes pulled an all-nighter to complete his projects quicker. The animation itself added the character’s levels of stress, revealing unreal, unimaginable and horror scenes.

The animation composes clean shapes and graphics to assemble the scenes, adding seamless transition in post-production to draw the relationship between environments and continuation of exaggeration and anxiety. The story accompanies by a background sound and sound effects from a peaceful to a tense environment. It aims to illustrate the atmosphere, emotion and reaction of the character.

Storyboard

Illustrations and Styling

Animation Sequences (Extract)

This experimental animation is William’s final work in his Media Arts (Honours) Research Project, aimed to explore how could the nightmare be portrayed in animated graphics.

Final Work

Software Used:

• Adobe Illustrator - Creating the shapes and graphics
• Avid Pro Tool - Creating background sound and sound effects
• Adobe Audition - Creating sound effects
• Adobe After Effects - Animating the shapes and graphics and compositing scenes.
• Adobe Premiere Pro - Final Assembly