The Brothers of Aragon
November 2021 - December 2021
School assignment for Professor Hayelin Choi
The Brothers of Aragon is an original story that I wanted to use as my story for this project. Our class had to make animated illustrations that can be interacted with on an platform called invision. The story had to be illustrated with six panels in landscape format. Each panel needed to have text and a piece that animates.
Process
This project needed to have a style that was not my own, so I researched some of my favorite animators and came across Tomm Moore who directed a series of Irish folklore films. His style was very shape based and reflected the tapestries and imagery that was seen in Irish mythology. I thought that his style would suit my story to connect with children as this is a story centered around two brothers.
Meet Adrian
Adrian is one of the titular characters of this story. He has the power to control water and has aspects that make him seem fish-like, such as having webbed hands, fins on his forearms, and sea foam green skin. Much of my inspiration for his design comes from the character designs of Pixar’s Luca, but I wanted him to still have the facial features that can still be recognizable as a human would be. Anytime he is seen I wanted him to be interacting with the water and the direction you see him gesture to reflected the movement of the water for each gif.
One of the main challenges was developing the compositions. I had the visuals down, but it was all a matter of scale and proportion, which I eventually understood courtesy of my professor. The other was reteaching myself how to use After Effects. I had only a rudimentary understanding of how the program works, so I had to decide what to animate and learned that I had to make things separate in photoshop for them to work.
Meet Zephyr
Zephyr is the younger brother of Adrian. He has the power to fly and control the weather with his emotions. To contrast his brother’s appearance I wanted him to have a circular facial feature brighter color palette, sky blues and yellow, to show that he is more playful and innocent. The colors also are the same as the background villagers to show how much he just wants to spend time with them. Similarly to when his brother interacts with the water, I wanted Zephyr to be either in motion or something else being in motion because of him.
It proved to be successful and then all I had to do then was polish everything so there were no stray marks in the illustrations when I published it on invision. The project was successful because it was capable of being interacted with on the platform. Everyone found my illustrations to be charming and the animations guided everyone toward the central focus of each illustration.
