Video:

Tittle: A normal day in a strange world

Documentation:

[Spoliers! Read after watching the animation]

This is the documentation for the creative process for this short. If you are reading this it means you either watched the animated short, or you don't care about spoilers (very brave of you).

Research 

The first 2 days were just doing research. I wanted to make something with as much respect as possible torwards people with derealization. During this time of research I found an animation called "Derealization" by Nora Askew which worked as a good source of inspiration.

Scripting and planning

The next step was to make a Script for the short. It turned out I ignored half the initial script. It was very rough anyways, the only thing that stayed the same from the initial draft and into the final video were:

• The Character design.
• The First and final mirror scenes (With minor modifications).
• What I call the "No taste" scene.

Now... What was the old script like?        ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Music and Sound design

Next let's talk about music and sound design. This was the last thing I did, but I want to leave the animation process to the end, since there is a lot to explain. 

The first song I want to mention is the music box song that appears on the middle of the video. It is an old song I never uploaded, I only used the first 10 seconds of the song, but it is actually 6 minutes, but it's pretty boring so I never uploaded it.

The second song I will talk about is the intro song, I made it for this particular animation, a little bit inspired by the "Inspiration Media" from the Jam and by some of my previous work. 

[Edit: I just uploaded the full song: "Derealization (Extended ver.) by Bored Cube"]

For the credits song I remembered about the series "ONE" by Cheesy Hfj and the ending song for the last episode. So I grabbed my guitar and played a simple chord progression. This took like +30 recordings, I didn't have much time to practice (this was 2 days before submitting) so the guitar recording is a little rough. but I really like the final result.

If you are curious, it goes like this:

• | F#m | Bm | Em | A || D | Bm | Em | A || D |

Nothing special with the SFX, I got them as royalty free sounds from Pixabay and mixed some of them in my video editor. 

A little trick I used with the storytelling using sound effects: 

While the video is 2 minutes long (without credits), I only have a minute of animation, so I made long cuts of audio only, which makes the viewer imagine what is happening, which I like a lot.

Animation

The first thing I did was design a character, just because it was the easiest thing to do. Fun fact: The sketchy look of the character was because I was doing animatic tests to see how to animate it, but never cleaned the lineart because:

1. I had limited time to finish the animation.
2. It made the theme of "This character doesn't feel like they fit" more clear by making the rest of the world have really clean lineart while they have really messy lineart.
3. It amplified the "hand drawn" effect the whole video has.

The reason I chose the black and white style is because of the Creation Jam Achievement "1-bit" which I think it fits the more sad tone of the Theme. Also the text boxes where inspired by Undertale. I didn't want to record voicelines and didn't had enough animation footage to explain what is the story, so I added this text boxes that explain the thoughts of our main character.

The art style is all thanks to 2 Blender modifiers:

• Noise: Makes lines wobble.
• Lineart: Adds lines over 3D objects.

Fun facts about the animation that no body will notice but are reall cool:

• All the world animation (Including noise) is made on 3's or 6's while the main character is animated on 2's or 4's making a difference between our character and their surroundings.
• Our main character is a 2D drawing while every scene is in 3D.
• The camera for the most part has our main character on the center, making the scenes look distant.
• For most scenes the world is blurry (The exceptions being the intro and when the character actually focuses on something in the world) and the radio static sound gets louder.

If you are curious, these are some screenshots of the timeline for both Blender and my Video Editor:

Credits on the video description. d===(￣▽￣)b