In one of our school semesters we had to focus on how to take an existing story and make it come alive by drawings and things alike. The story I got was about a 14 year old boy who was learning how to be a knight but of the last exam / final test, he got disrupted by someone who had a task for him. He had to deliver a letter to a knight. But it was a very important letter and he had to hurry! When he found the knight he discovered that the knight was badly wounded and on the brink of the death. The knight gave some of his stuff and his horse and send the young boy on a mission to deliver the letter himself. 

The story spoke to me because it makes me think of stories like Narnia and Lord of the Rings. Small inexperienced people who need to be brave and kind, make allies and defy all kinds of impossible situations to save lives. I always love those stories, also just the environments and side characters are all very interesting. 

 

We had to make a trailer for the book, a cover for the book, a comic and one 'free assignment' where we had free reign, as long as we took the story as inspiration. 

 

In this semester I was a bit too hooked up with the pre-production and my schedule was not well made at all, so that put me in a time crunch so that's why I still had to redo some of these to get a passing grade. That means this was a project I worked on from 2022 until the beginning of 2025 (in between other things of course)

The book trailer

This is the end result of the book trailer. 

2D animation short film made in blender.

This is the moving storyboard/ animatic I first made. Animating was still very new to me but I really love storyboarding so I really put everything in the storyboard and then realised I could never animate this in the short amount of time we had. So I just tried to do the other assignments to still show the teachers I am hardworking, even though I couldn't finish everything. 

Because of the fact I have to redo this part of my project, I started with a new storyboard. I wanted to create a feeling of a pop-up book where the characters are literally moving trough the book. Lots of paper textures, ink dripping, paper burning and playing around with origami and stuff. I wanted to combine stopmotion animation, and 2d animation.

Here are some of the storyboards I made as the process. I really loved this semester. It really focussed on storyboarding, character design and animation and I really loved the lessons we got to learn these skills. The storyboard lessons were my favourite, mostly because of the amazing teacher we had. Here are some examples of some of the storyboards I made. As you can see, I prefer working analog and than later using it as a reference for my digital moving storyboard.  

Comic page

We also had to make a comic and I really wanted to challenge myself. As I told earlier, I really loved the environments so I first wanted to just do a comic with lots of wide shots and composition but I know myself pretty well and was scared about not being stimulated enough. So that's why I chose a fight scene. Just to challenge myself even more and play around with how timing and fighting could look in comic form. I also wanted a really complicated black and white shading feel. The story has a lot of medieval themes so I wanted to have lots of cross hatching, a bit like. a monk merged with modern comic artist merged whaha. I'm very proud of how this turned out. I feel like I would do this a lot differently now, but I see lots of improvement in this piece alone so it's great to look back on.

Here is some process! I was really struggling with how to keep as much momentum in the comic as possible and have a kind of beginning and end with just 2 pages. Also lots of different character designs! I really struggled with style so it is kind of fun to see how many designs I went trough. 

Bookcover

The bookcover was not something I was really exited to do. My teacher was very negative about my ideas but couldn't really give any feedback about how I could improve? And I do not mind getting feedback or anything like that, it's just very discouraging to get everything you think of slammed into the ground. But I kept it interesting for myself to try something new, digital painting. I like how the colors and texture turned out, but it was made in a hurry so things like composition and lighting could be better.

Something I did really enjoy about this was the assignment to go to a book store and look for bookcovers you liked and you had to find out what about it you liked. I don't know, maybe it was also just because I went to the bookstore with my crush whaha. I am very biased :').

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