Here’s my final project! It was quite exciting to use different mediums of animation in order to tell one story, as it’s not something that I’ve done before. It turned out quite different from the script that I wrote for it, as I made quite a few changes to the plot while I worked on the visuals, which made planning more difficult for myself. Because of this, I decided to focus only on the beginning part of Harmonica-Man’s story, where he struggles to be accepted by the people around him. I’m hoping to continue with this character, as I don’t feel that I’ve actually completed his story (even though my ironic inclusion of the “The End” tag would tell you otherwise).

When it comes to visuals, the subway station scene was the most interesting thing to work on. At first, I actually tried to do it through paper animation, but it was a nightmare to manage. So, I figured that I’d take a photo of each object that I knew was going to have to be moved, and animate it digitally through a photo editing software. This turned out great, as I feel that I was able to replicate the look of paper animation fairly well. Now I understand why South Park moved to digital paper animation so quickly!

If I were going to keep working on this project, I’d probably try to give more focus to the audio. I got really carried away with the story and visuals, so audio ended up on the editing back-burner. Opposing that, I’d like to work with even more visual mediums in this story. I left out flat, baked, and 3D claymation, as well as live-action footage due to my lack of experience in those areas. As I worked, I found that using multiple visual mediums makes consistent storytelling pretty difficult, which is why I went with visual styles that are similar to each other.

Since I did the visuals, voices, and quite a bit of the audio, I didn’t feel like credits were a necessary inclusion to the video. The music at the end is from Mixkit (I highly recommend it, as it’s one of the better free audio resources in my opinion), and the staircase image used in the Subway Station scene was taken by Andreas Levers.

By Kaiden Kuntz