Nana

2D Animation

Nana is a restless little girl full of energy that is constantly going into her world of imagination, either to play or to overcome small obstacles in her day to day life.

Nana was created alongside a classmate as a graduation short animation for my Bachelor's degree in Digital Animation.

Software used: Photoshop, Audition, After Effects, and Premiere Pro

Animation

Ideation

The idea for Nana came from conversations between me and my classmate about our childhoods since we have distinct backgrounds, me growing up in Finland and Portugal and she growing up in Angola and coming to Portugal at a later age, despite those differences there was something that was common to both of us... the creation of imaginary worlds that only made sense to us.

During various brainstorming sessions, we came up with multiple scenarios where the child's imagination would be used to both entertain as well overcome fears and unwanted situations. There were some hard cuts that had to be made in order to make an animation that would be finished by the deadline.

In the end, it was decided that the animation would focus on a single day when Nana wakes up and has to eat a meal that she isn't a fan of, which sends her into an adventure where the floor is lava, a green dinosaur comes to her rescue and goes into an Indiana Jones-esc type of adventure to reach the most coveted price... a pudding... erm a diamond!

Inspiration

Visual development

One thing we wanted to capture with this animation was the childlike view of the world, and with that came adopting a visual style that resembles children's drawings and playing with various paper textures.

For inspiration for this style that was created was childhood drawings and how it didn't seem to matter what was being used to draw on or the materials used.

In order to keep things legible we decided to only use one brush for the character and a brush for the background and give more texture and dimension by using various paper textures to separate the various elements, which is also reminiscent of the collage we used to do as children.

The floor is lava | Study 1

The floor is lava | Study 2

The floor is lava | Study 3

Cavern | Character and BG study

Character development

The design of our main character, Nana, suffered a lot of changes as the visual style of the animation evolved.

It began on something more complex and progressively got simpler and simpler so it would add more meaning to our animation (with the added bonus of making her easier to animate).