Gears
As my final project for animation class, Gears started out as two ideas: robots and 1950s aesthetic. That was all I needed to get my own gears working and come up with a simple story that could be told in less than two minutes.
I wanted to capture the style of 50s/60s design and storytelling. From the typeface to the moral ending of the story, I wanted it to be so generically that time period that it almost spoofs it. I researched print and tv advertisements, fashion, magazines and watched a lot of Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
I then developed my own character designs: simple and cute, but also have an eerie, gothic quality to them. I wanted the story to be an old-fashioned moral lesson—with it spelled out in the end and everything—the protagonist was going to do something nice for someone else and get rewarded for it. Simple.
The not-so-simple part was animating this simple story. I had to break apart each character (and After Effects) and put them back together again.
This project was an important part of my developing design style and also set in motion the continued use of gears (intentional or not) in many of my designs.
Roles
- Director
- Writer
- Designer
- Animator
- Sound design
