Artist's Statement:
This work is a short-story depicting two of my most recent original characters, Alina and Ylva, and how they got their start in demon hunting, and was written to help me work on their character, and to help build their world. A few things that influenced me in the creation of these characters - and eventually, this story - were influenced by various animations I’ve seen in my life, ranging from feature films like Princess Mononoke to little animated gifs like the ones made by k-eke on Tumblr. Materials used in this project include: a Wacom Intuos Comic, Clip Studio Paint, Google Docs, and my trusty 3DS equipped with Flipnote Studio 3D. After committing to the topic of the story, I had to spend some time (perhaps an unnecessary amount of it) thinking of the content of the story, starting with the broad strokes in my head, then refined to the details in writing, figuring out key/link words and phrases as I wrote. After finishing the writing, I started working on the animation, then the website, then the illustrations and ask blogs. I did things in this order because at the time, I didn’t really know what, exactly, everything would look like, which made writing the story first necessary. I originally planned for this to be a big project - a long story, a lon of sounds to compliment what was happening, and images and animations to display what was happening in the story. Unfortunately, I got held up with a lot of projects and the realization that I don’t have the skills or programs necessary to do what I wanted, so I wasn’t able to put everything in that I wanted to.
Conceptual Framework:
When making this story, I wanted to use it as an opportunity to work out my characters’ personality past a basic generalization, and I planned on doing so by actually writing out and documenting their story (as opposed to just keeping it in my head, as I do with all my other characters). However, throughout the process of making, I discovered that I’d need to come up with references for more than just the characters’ personality - I’d need to make a reference sheet for the illustrations so I’d keep a consistent style, I’d need to figure out how their home was set up so I could keep a consistent-ish background, what their world was like so I could think of environments and climate - and it became a much larger task than originally intended.
Self Reflection:
I think that, of all the learning opportunities I’ve had throughout this project, the biggest one is that storytelling is an incredibly collaborative process - much more so than I had originally anticipated. I thought I could get done with the writing without any outside help, but I ended up needing to have a friend read it and give me suggestions on how to fix it. If I had gone to someone for help, I probably could have used sound in my story, but because I didn’t, I couldn’t include it. There are a number of other things in this project that could have gone better if I had asked for help, but because I didn’t I ended up with a product that isn’t nearly as good as it could have been. On the bright side, since I learned this lesson now instead of later, future projects hopefully won’t suffer as much as this one did.