Main Story

Berry, a middle-aged man, is struggling with his body image. He finds himself looking in the mirror time and time again, feeling defeated. After realizing the culprit is his own diet, and realizing how not smart it is to eat a diet that primarily consists of artificial foods, Berry must challenge his diet to become the person he has always wanted to be.

About Us

Producer - Saturn Guerrero

Trello Master - Hadley Babb

Scrum Master - Thalia Sibaja

We are three students from Sno-Isle Technology Skills Center, located in Mukilteo, Washington. The three of us enjoy art and chose to work together on our final project to create a unique story that relates to the prompt we were given - in a rather unconventional way.

The Prompt

The prompt that we were given was "Artificial but not Intelligent." We interpreted this prompt differently than a lot of other teams in our class. Instead of doing robots, we chose to do something unique - we chose to focus on the idea of artificial foods and the dangers of consuming too many, and how consuming a diet of primarily artificial foods isn't smart, and is bad for a person's health. 

Features

The Message

Our team decided to use ideas that the viewer could relate to. For example, we used the idea of being unhappy with your body image. We used this to implement a message of body positivity; that if a person is unhappy with their body image, sometimes a healthier diet can help someone obtain a body image that they are proud of. 

Colors and their meaning

Our team used vibrant colors for our characters and our foreground elements in order to make them stand out against the dull backgrounds that we chose. We used the color red in most of the food that had artificial foods in it because the dye red 40 tends to be one of the more common artificial food dyes - and one that people associate food dye with. 

We also used the color of the character to signify the change of diet. At the beginning of the animation, Berry's color palette consists of shades of dull blue with a red streak in his hair. Towards the end of the animation, Berry's color palette consists of shades of a brighter blue with an orange streak in his hair. This signifies the change of diet and lifestyle that Berry undergoes in the animation. The brighter colors are meant to show Berry's satisfaction in his body image, as well as his happiness towards the end of the animation. 

Comedic Elements

The brands showcased in the animation are a play of words on many of the unhealthy brands we see in many grocery stores today.  This is meant to add a comedic element to an otherwise mostly melancholic animation.

Use of Psychological Elements

In film, it actually matters what way a character moves on screen. It matters whether your characters are moving to the right or left across the screen or whether they appear on the left or right side of the screen, or whether they are right-handed or left-handed. It has to do with science and psychology. 

Moving toward the camera shows power, domination, and aggression. Moving away from the camera shows weakness. Similarly, characters being looked down on show fragility, and high-up characters are more dominant. 

Why does this matter? In Western culture, left to right indicates the progression of time; our language reads from left to right, books begin from left and finish right. In video games, players start on the left side and finish the level on the right.  

Principles of Animation Used

Anticipation

Our animation features elements of anticipation that adds realism and helps to prepare the audience for some action in the scenes. 

Staging

Our animation features staging which causes the audience's attention to be on important elements of the story that we are telling and to avoid distracting them with unnecessary detail.  We use a combination of lighting, framing, and composition to effectively use this principle of animation. 

Squash and Stretch

Our animation is applied to our character's weight (for example, Berry's belly). This animation, while exaggerated, is grounded in reality because it creates the illusion of belly being distorted by an outside force - gravity. This helps the animation have a more realistic feel, even though the characters are much more cartoonish. 

Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose

Our animation employs this principle by drawing key frames and filling in the intervals later.  Because relation to surroundings and composition become more important, this approach is best for our animation that features a lot of emotional scenes. This principle is utilizied to create a fluid illusion of movement for action scenes. 

Follow Through and Overlapping Action

Our animation uses this to make the movement in the animation more realistic and create the impression that the characters are following the laws of physics. We animated parts of the body - like the belly and hair - that continue to move when a character stops and then pull back towards the object or person, just like in real life. 

Arcs

In real life, most actions have an arched trajectory. To achieve more realism, we employed this principle of animation into our animated short. Whether it was the effect of limbs moving or an object being thrown, these movements follow natural arcs that create fluidity. This helped us to avoid unnatural and erratic animation in our short. 

Secondary Action

This principle of animation helps emphasize the main action in a scene by the addition an extra dimension to the characters and objects within our animation. We used subtleties, which helped to give color to our animation and made the characters appear more human. 

Timing

We used this animation to help ground our animation in realism, as everything appears to follow the laws of physics. We did our best to get the timing right for everything, even acting out some scenes to ensure the most accurate timing in our animation. 

Exaggeration

We tried our best to exaggerate our characters, making in true to reality while still making elements of exaggeration. This helps the animation to be much more fun and exciting, and helps to make our characters pop and stand out in our animation

Solid Drawing

We used solid drawing and made our animation feel more 3D by using lighting, shadows, a darker background, and even objects that appear 3D. Although our character is not 3D, many of the objects around the scene are, which helps ground the viewer in reality even more.