Creacharms!

Progress

The animatic is officially done! All of the shots from my storyboards have been expanded upon and synced up to the scratch music track. That means it’s time to hunker down and use these next weeks to animate! Seeing the project in motion has been really motivating, and I’m super excited to get to share more with you here soon!

Before that, part of finishing the animatic was creating some more character designs. I wanted to share a little timelapse of a quick-and-dirty character design I made for an opposing Charmer.

My main idea going in was a split black-and-white baggy overshirt of some kind. I wanted the design to have an accent color that looked like a nice opposite to the MC’s greens and yellows. On the whole, a more artificial vibe to contrast the MC’s more natural palette. You’ll see I originally tried an orange (I am very tied to this Charmer being ginger with freckles for whatever reason), but ended on a purple. Theres still room to play with colors until it’s cleanup time, but getting the big ideas of the design down was the most important!

Who?

Hello there! I'm @auden-dahn, and this is my first project in the world of Creacharms. I'm an illustrator and animator currently earning my BFA in college, and this project is my final as a Junior!

What?

This project is an animated music video called "My Lucky Charm". It follows a young human's travels through a world full of elemental creatures to befriend! It will be 2D (animated in Rough Animator and Procreate on iPad) and have original music by me.

Why?

A few reasons! Sentimentally, I grew up on games like Pokemon and Animal Crossing since before I could read. Even without fully understanding what was going on, I felt at home in these colorful, natural environments that tied humanity into nature and technology. I knew when I grew up that I wanted to create worlds just like that, ones that anyone can feel at home in as they explore themselves and what it means to be in the beautiful interconnected web of life! I hope you can find joy here!

Practically, I want to push my animation further than I ever have before! I want to practice dynamic posing, character expressions and personality, camera movement, anticipation, the works! I have a bad habit of waiting to do things until I'm "good enough" or "ready", and I want to defy that by jumping into this project head first!

With these questions out of the way, let me show you what I've got so far!

Animation

I am currently in the pre-production stage, so right now it's about getting down the key moments and timing overall. The final animation and song will be a minimum of 1:30 long, so right now I'm mapping ideas in time to create my first rough animatic!

Music

This is my first time producing music to a finished enough state to share publicly, and i'm really excited to get there! The original idea was to have OpenUTAU Teto sing the vocals, but after a great class critique we decided it would have more of the authentic, down-to-earth feel I was looking for if I just sang it myself.

Right now, I have this loop/snippet and the lyrics all written! I'll be making a rough cut to time my animatic out to, then finalizing the music before animation clean-up. I can't wait to share more with you!

Conclusion