#dmffinal

Set in an old style orphanage, the story opens with one of the main characters (Alice) chewing gum in class, which draws the attention of the teacher. Her classmate Robert takes the fall for Alice, and for his heroic deed Alice gives Robert the rest of her gum. The exchange of the gum is used as a metaphor for love and trust. The early scenes present key symbols such as rainbows, the full moon, and a single gum tree on a hill. The initial text defines Alice's and Robert's innocent beliefs that will define their characters as they grow up. Alice is adopted, and Robert goes to Uni and finishes a degree. He contacts Alice and true love blossoms. Robert cannot contact Alice and starts to worry. He goes to her parents house and is told that Alice is dying from an incurable hereditary disease. Robert presents the gum that has kept for many years and changed Alices mind, and they spend the last few days of Alice's life retracing their past and reliving their memeories. In the last scene the gum falls from her hand as she dies while Robert is carrying her to the gum tree.

Final Animation

It took me a while to settle on a conceptual direction for my self portrait and I found myself procrastinating a lot. I decided I wanted to save myself the stress and just portray myself and my ability as naturally as possible so that I didn't have to stress myself too much by struggling to brainstorm - So, I decided procrastination would be my core concept as it's something I do a lot. Procrastination for me is typically just escapism through reading comics, watching movies or playing video games. I feel video games really represent an ultimate sort of escapism and given my previous experience with video game mods and gifs mentioned earlier here on my tumblr I figured they'd be a good starting point. Using methods described earlier on my tumblr I created a rapidly changing background animation using images from old video games and video game mods/hacks and editted them all individually and manually to give it a very retro look. I then hand-drew my self portrait over most frames and decided I wanted my face to melt away shortly before the end of the animation where a final frame rapidly flashes the words "You're dead" - The idea here is the irony of procrastination where all you do is escape life until it's over. Complications encountered were solely to do with .gif encode optimisation and uploading. Despite meeting tumblr's criteria, no amount of optimisation and compression allowed me to upload it directly. I eventually went through imgur which required me to cut a substantial portion of my animation, cutting the amount of hand-drawn frames in half to produce what is seen here. Frame Count: 35 ([email protected][email protected]) Duration: 3.12 seconds