The Unexpected Visitor
For this project, I was given 5 days and a prompt to fulfill. I was tasked with creating a 15 second animation(excluding the title and credits) about an “unexpected or surprising visitor” and a character that reacts to them with emotion. I used Toon Boom Harmony to bring my characters and their story to life.
My target audience was teens to young adults(females in particular) that live alone and understand the stakes and fear of someone being in your space that perhaps you weren’t expecting. It’s for people that may be jumpy, so I wanted to keep it relatable while also bringing in some weird fantasy elements to throw the audience off guard, then give it a spice of comedy once the main character realizes who it is that she just smacked in the face with her book.
I feel that a good amount of young adults know the trope of the friend that shows up with no warning(regardless of which side of the situation they happen to stand on) and I wanted it to have an underlying theme of almost making a jab at those friends to give it some comedy and keep it as relatable as (in)humanly possible.
The animatic I created was a very rough draft, but it was a great way to map out how much I could fit into 15 seconds, where I wanted everything, how it should look, spacial awareness, etc.
When creating projects, sometimes I like brainstorming and really just throwing story ideas onto paper to gather my thoughts. It helps me to have a guide(even if sloppy, adapted, or completely different) to give me a good start. This was my “rough draft” for The Unexpected Visitor.
I had a bit of trouble with the timing and trying to fit my story into 15 seconds, but I adapted and cut down the original idea to make it shorter and still achieving the original goal.