Cup O’ Joe
My graduation project is a 2D animation film following the story of a 14-year-old protagonist running her family’s cafe until her parents return all by herself for the first time. With a set of problems and multiple customers with their little interactions, the story will follow how my main character manages to run the cafe all by herself.
You can click here to watch the full video!
Character Design
It all begins with doodles and grows to what you can see here! With Cup O’ Joe focusing on a younger audience, I focused on letting the characters and their designs seem welcoming, inclusive, and fun. The process was very rewarding and despite it being my first time, I enjoyed pushing myself in this project. Check it out in more detail below.
Storyboard
Storyboarding this graduation project was the best part! As an artist who grew up doodling and drawing on her papers, I put together my papers and got to work. With 244 hand-drawn frames for this storyboard, I pushed through the challenge and put my skills to good use. Under a tight schedule, I completed this storyboard and was able to use every frame in my graduation project which helped me save so much time in the long run.
Below, you can see my storyboard.
Experience
Overall, this was a wonderful experience! A very big factor was how fun it was for me to see my work in fields I’d never explored before, especially by myself. With the lighthearted story I created, I hope that I can uplift someone or showcase my skills artistically to prove to myself and others that I’m more than willing to explore avenues and perform to my maximum ability in them whether I’ve ventured then before or not.
I had a great time especially with creating my backgrounds despite initially hating anything that had to do with that. I also learned to draw and operate faster under pressure and see where I can cut corners much better than I could’ve earlier. My storyboard skills also benefited me in reusing many of the drawings on top to get the idea and angle which assisted in this greatly.