The Story Commercial is based off the English Short Story. The editing and animating process takes place largely in Adobe AfterEffects, a program perfect for video editing. The Commercial is like an ad you might see for a book on TV or Youtube… however, I took inspiration from the Lezhin Comics Ad you might have seen on Youtube. The dreamy music, the dramatic voice-over, and the flowing static images were simple enough to pull off and impressive enough if I did it right.

My process essentially began by trying to tell a story. The Lezhin Comics expressed their story through someone reading aloud a love letter to their best friend. My video doesn’t animate any scenes from the actual story, but instead introduces the conflict through a tense interaction between admirer and admired (as in the admirer never got the courage to say anything). The images are static but look animated through a clever use of fade aways and fade-ins. I of course took that technique from Lezhin Comics.

I drew all the images in Illustrator, which I’ve used a bit over my Freestyle years. The actual process itself wasn’t difficult, just time-consuming and detail-oriented. The most difficult task was actually drawing the images on paper. I’m no artist and my first ever visual art depicting a person looked similar to a… phallic object. In particular, the hardest part was figuring out the braids on my character. If you don’t look at them too closely though, they look good enough.

As a little fun fact, I learned my Junior year that Freestyle Academy likes to take its stories and turn them into visual narratives. It’s a feat I admire, but it’s exactly why my Short Story takes place in a ‘white space’ dream. If it ever came to animating the actual story, then I wouldn’t have to worry about drawing the environment (although the lack of environment arguably might be harder to depict without looking even more amateur-ish).

Click below to see my Commercial! Below that is my process in AfterEffects!