"But dad... Why didn't they use Google Maps?"
"Oh sweetie, in that time and age there weren't cellphones nor GPS like we have today."
"Then how didn't they get lost?"
The starts always were more important and useful than we could think. Join Maia and her dad to find out more about their uses.
This short animation was done for my internship at Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço de Lisboa (IA), and it explores the uses that stars and constellations have in the daily life.
Since the animation is about astronomy most of animated in the night sky, although there are some appearances of Maia and her father. The animation starts when Maia wakes up in the middle of the night unable to sleep and moves towards the campfire with her father, where they start stargazing before having a conversation about the uses of stars. From there the sky serves as the stage to explain various concepts such as celestial navigation, the difference between longitude and latitude, and the differences between the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere.
A side note worth mentioning, the animation is in Portuguese and there aren't English subtitles or plans to create an English version of the voices.
Visual Development
After having an idea and a script for the animation, it was time to start sketching out how the characters and scenery should look like. Due time constraints there wasn't a vast iteration process, there weren't more studies about the facial expression and how the characters would move.
The characters consists of Maia, a curious little girl who cannot fall asleep during a camping trip, and her father, who is always ready to answer Maia's questions. Since the narrative takes place in the middle of the night the characters are in their pijamas, in Maia's pijamas there is a simpler and child-like representation of stars, while the father was various constellations represented in his pijama bottoms.
The backgrounds have the same visual language that the characters so that all the elements bellow in the same visual universe. They are a darker tone to them to represent the night, there are some differences between the part where Maia and her Father live and the animation happening in the sky.
While when Maia and her Father appear on screen there are colours present, when the animation in the sky is happening is more monochromatic only featuring dark blues and a white-ish colour for the stars. Generally the night sky is on screen on the sides it appears the silhouette of the forest (expect when there are mentions of the southern hemisphere).
