Illustration & Visual Narrative : Task 4
26/11/2025 - 04/01/2026 (Week 10 - Week 14)
Chan Xin Yean, 0377851
Illustration & Visual Narrative
Task 4 : Animatic Illustrations
TUTORIALS
During the tutorials, teacher showed us a few examples of the limited animations that we could reference in our works. There were a few things that teacher explained :
- The animations does not need to be very complicated and extravagant
- Simple changes to some elements of the illustration is preferred
- If we wanted the animation to move fast, the period of the frames should be shorter and vice versa.
- The captions of the video needs to be accounted during storyboarding
- We can include simple animations to the captions
INSTRUCTIONS
Generate and communicate design concepts, use creative thinking, and utilise information and communication technology. The project requires creating a poetic, life-lesson animated video with a caption suitable for social media posts. The video must be between 15 – 20 seconds in duration and include at least 3 sequences of animated illustration. It must also include sound, audio narrative, and the script's caption (including the author's name in the caption, but not in the narration).
We must choose ONE script from a provided list of quotes from various authors. The final output dimensions are 1920 px in Height and 1080 px in Width, with a Portrait/Vertical orientation.
Final Submission Files:
- Adobe Illustrator files (.ai),
- Final Animated Video file (.mp4) with sound, background music, animation, and script overlay
- Documentation file (.pdf) which includes a description of inspiration, mood board, storyboard, script, detailed information, rationale, and self-reflection.
PROCESS WORK
At the start of this project, I chose the script I wanted to illustrate and animate from the given slides :
" I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination."- Jimmy Dean
Research
From the script, I wanted to do an illustration that portrays the scripts message directly, so I focused oon finding inspiration that was related to the sea. Then I came across the animation movie, Song of the Sea that I used to watch when I was a kid. After rewatching the movie, I remembered how I liked the illustration style and the overall concept of the story. I liked how they used simple lines to illustrate their characters and the sea but still maintained visual appeal for the audience.
 |
| Figure 1.0 Inspiration from Song of the Sea |
Besides that, I also got some inspiration from a video game that I once played called Omori especially in the character designs as I personally would like to try the simple style of characters in this project.
 |
| Figure 1.1 Inspiration from Omori |
After that, I went on Pinterest to find some more illustrations related to the sea or the wind breeze. As I wasn't really familiar with how I should animate or illustrate the sea or the breeze. I stumbled upon this animated gif that was posted in instagram and I found it suitable for the script.
 |
| Figure 1.2 Inspiration from animated gif video |
I also found a few illustrations that includes interesting compositions that I thought I could reference in my work when scrolling through Pinterest. I also search for character design reference especially for the hands as I didn't know how to illustrate a simple hand. Besides that, I looked for references on boat illustration to get an idea of how I wanted my boat to look like. I decided on illustrating the sailboat as I thought it was the easiest to simplify along with the illustrations I found on Pinterest.
 |
| Figure 1.3 Mood board |
Sketching/Storyboarding
After searching for some reference, I thought of doing a girl sailing to reach her destination and decided to separate the script into 4 different parts and included the animation plans for each scene :
Part 1 ("I can't change the direction of the wind")
I decided to illustrate a girl standing with the waves in the background and the hair blowing towards the left to portray the wind. I wanted to animate the word wind, so I plan to make it a different font from the other captions.
Part 2 ("but I can adjust my sails")
I would like to portray that a storm is coming as usually if the wind blows it is expected that rain will be arriving and in this cases, the waves will be stronger. Thus, I positioned the waves to take up a. much larger space than the sky or the boat. I also posed my character to pull the string of the sailboat to convey the adjust my sails part of the script.
Part 3 ("to always reach")
I wanted to do a transition scene before reaching too the peacefulness of the last scene, so I decided too use the top view of the boat in the middle of a calm sea as clouds are passing by.
Part 4 ("my destination")
As to directly relate to the script, I wanted the girl to reach an island with a person waving from afar to welcome her. I used the composition I found in Pinterest that focuses on the boat while the destination is far back to emphasise that the girl is reaching her destination. I plan to make the words glow to convey that the destination is important to the girl.
 |
| Figure 1.4 Storyboard with animation plans |
Digitisation
Scene 1
After getting the approval from teacher, I proceeded with illustrating the 4 scenes in Adobe Illustrator. I started with doing the first scene first to get an idea of how I wanted the colour palette to be like. I also referenced the image I found from Pinterest of the power puff girls for the colours of the sea.
 |
| Figure 1.5 Base of scene 1 |
After that, I decided to change the eyes of the character as she looks too soulless to my liking and I tried different variations of illustrating the eyes. I decided on the last eyes I did as it didn't run far from the original eyes. I also liked how the mouth is agape as it could show the the character is noticing that winds are coming.
 |
| Figure 1.6 Trying out different illustration of the eyes |
Then, I decided to make the gradient of the sea to be more dramatic, but I thought that it didn't fit the overall simple concept that I'm trying to follow.
 |
| Figure 1.7 Trying a different style of gradient |
Then I finally decided to change the waves into a more pointier look to follow the concept of my inspiration. Besides that, I added a few other details to the scene like the shadows for the character and the extra clouds and light rays to the background. Besides that, I edited the line width of the character.
 |
| Figure 1.8 Final 1st scene illustration |
Scene 2
For the second scene, it was relatively easier to colour and outline as I can reference the first scene. I started with a blue background and some clouds. Then moved on with coloring the sea and the outlined boat and person.
 |
| Figure 1.9 Process of colouring and outlining the 2nd panel |
I mainly struggled with doing the hands that is gripping the string as I didn't know how to illustrate it wiith a simple style without it looking weird.
 |
| Figure 1.10 Close up on editing the hands |
After that, I made the sky grey and added lightning strikes as I thought it visualises the storm better. Besides that, I also added a few more waves and the gradient of the waves as I thought that the sea was looking too plain.
 |
| Figure 1.11 Adding waves in front |
 |
| Figure 1.12 Final 2nd scene illustration |
Scene 3
This scene focuses on the clouds and the boat is small. It was quite tedious to edit the small details of the boat and the character. After adding the base colours to the sea and doing the clouds, added small lines to better indicate that the boat in on the sea.
 |
| Figure 1.13 Adding small lines on the sea |
After that I coloured the boat and character as by selecting the colours from scene 2 after outlining the both.
 |
| Figure 1.14 Adding the into the sea |
Then, I moved on with adding coconut on the boat, as I thought that to survive the character needs to have certain food or drinks on the boat.
 |
| Figure 1.15 Adding gradient to coconut |
After that I decided to add shadows to the bottom of the boat and lighten the brown surface of the boat.
 |
| Figure 1.16 Editing the colour of the boat |
Then, I added small waves t the back of the boat to better portray that it is moving.
 |
| Figure 1.17 Adding the waves to the boat |
 |
| Figure 1.18 Final 3rd scene illustration |
4th Scene
I started the illustration with the background for scene 4 as thought it was going to be relatively easy. I didn't want to include much outlines to the background as I wanted it to seem like it is far away. I made 2 shapes for the city combining rectangles and merge them into one shape using the shape builder tool. Besides that, I copy and pasted the clouds from panel 1 to the sky and made a small black figure thats holding their hand up to wave to the character.
 |
| Figure 1.19 Process of illustrating the background |
After that, I added the shadows to where the figure was standing and used gaussian blur to make it smoother.
 |
| Figure 1.20 Adding shadows and gaussian blur |
For the sea, I used the same concept as the 3rd scene. Besides that I added the boat and the character that I outlined based on the sketch and coloured and created the waves that are following the boat.
 |
| Figure 1.21 Process of illustration |
 |
| Figure 1.22 Final 4th scene illustration |
Animating
After I'm done with the Illustration, I begin to animate the first panel using the puppet warp tool in Adobe Illustrator. I also used the direct selection tool to edit the hair of the character.
 |
| Figure 1.23 Animating Process for 1st Scene |
For the 2nd scene, I grouped the boat and the people and adjusted the position of them to move up and down. Besides that, I also edited the waves using the direct selection tool.
 |
| Figure 1.24 Final Edited Panels for 2nd scene |
For the 3rd scene, I moved the position of the clouds to move backwards.
 |
| Figure 1.25 Final Edited Panels for 3rd scene |
For the 4th scene, I warped the waves thats near to the boat.
 |
| Figure 1.26 Animation process for 4th scene |
Capcut
After editing the panels, I imported the panels to Capcut and begin duplicating the panels. I also added fade in to every beginning of the scene.
 |
| Figure 1.27 Duplicating panels |
I then added the flash effect to the beginning of the 2nd scene then proceeded to add the sound effects for the video like the sound of the waves and the sound of thunder. After that I added the audio of the script that I generated using the app ElevenLabs and created the captions for the video. As I would like to have. the word wind in scene 1 to be behind of the character, I had to overlay another layer of scene 1 and erase the background of the panel. I then added the wave effect for the word to emphasise on the strong wind.
 |
| Figure 1.28 Animation Process |
Furthermore, I added the fade in effect for all the words too to make sure the captions appear one by one smoothly. For the words sails and my destination, I edited the font and colours of the word along with making the word my destination glow. After that I placed a background music that suits my video.
Final Outcome
Link to the Video : https://youtube.com/shorts/qhj_ilgrPoo
Documentation
Figure 2.1 Documentation Slides
Rationale
For this project, I focused on the script “I can’t change the direction of the wind but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” from Jimmy Dean when deciding what to do with the illustration.Thus, I thought of doing a girl sailing as it directly interprets the message of the script. I divided the script into 4 parts and used puppet warp tool in Adobe Illustrator to animate the illustrations. I decided to do a loop limited animation for my work as it keeps the simple vibe that I was planning to do. Thus, I made small changes using the puppet warp tool to my illustrations and duplicated them to create a loop.
TECHNIQUES APPLIED
At the illustration stage, I mainly used the pen tool and the direct selection tool to with the outlining and colouring and I added gradient to most of the colouring too. I used the puppet warp tool and the direct selection tool to edit and distorted some parts of the illustration frame by frame for the animation. For the video editing process, I duplicated the frames I created to extend the duration of each scene and added fade in transitions for each of the scene. Then, I placed the sound effects of the waves and thunder to the video and added the thunder flash to the 2nd scene aligning with the sound effects. After that, I overlaid the captions as a caption needs to be behind the character I overlayed another layer of the illustration and removed the background and placed it on the top of the caption layer. I made each caption to fade in and animated the word wind and used a different font to emphasise on the word. Other than that, I also changed the font of the word sails and reach to create emphasise. Then, I made the words my destination glow, as I wanted it to portray the warm feeling and importance of it. I also placed the audio of the caption that I generated from ElevenLabs and separated them into the 4 parts. I added the background music for my video at the very end.
FEEDBACK
Week 12
Teacher said the storyboard and sketch was good. I can proceed with the digitisation.
Week 14
The animation video was good.
REFLECTION
Overall, the process was enjoyable, although I initially struggled with selecting a script to animate as I had no clear ideas for captions. After spending some time reflecting, I was eventually able to decide on a suitable script. Creating a storyboard for the chosen script was easier than expected, as previous tasks had helped me become more comfortable with visually structuring a narrative. However, during the illustration stage, I faced challenges in deciding how to design the waves and sea, as there were many possible approaches. Since I aimed for a simple visual style, I ultimately used line work and subtle gradients for the waves, drawing inspiration from the animated film Song of the Sea.
In addition, I encountered difficulties when illustrating the character, as it was my first time using a vector-based platform, Adobe Illustrator, to create a character. At times, the illustration appeared too plain compared to my initial sketch, but with adjustments and refinements, I was able to produce an illustration that I felt satisfied with.
The animation phase was also a new experience, particularly using the Puppet Warp tool, which took some time to get used to but proved to be an interesting and valuable learning process. I then used CapCut to assemble the artboards into a complete animation video. This stage was especially enjoyable, as I was able to select sound effects, background music, and add transitions and visual effects. Seeing my illustration come to life through animation was both exciting and rewarding. Furthermore, it was my first time generating audio using artificial intelligence, and I found it fascinating how AI could be a helpful and efficient tool, especially with the variety of voices available to convey different moods and tones.
Overall, this project was filled with valuable learning experiences and opportunities to apply previously learned techniques, and it was fulfilling to create a limited animation myself rather than simply being an audience to animated works.
Comments
Post a Comment