The central idea is to inform individuals that:

Life is short, and one is not guaranteed tomorrow. If death comes today, and the biblical truth of eternity is real, is one spending time chasing after things without an eternal value?

As I considered how to convey this concept through narrative storytelling, I started brainstorming with different word clouds, drawing inspiration from song lyrics and bible verses related to the topic of life and death. This is an important step to narrow down the main concept before I begin to develop the script for the animated shot.

Through exploring different words and ideas, I narrowed down a general concept:

“If life were a game, does the person with the most points win in the end?”

I then was able to make plans for the story plot and story beats, which determined the general flow of the imaginative story.

Different questions were asked during this process to ensure that the script accurately addressed the research problem and survey response from the primary research.

The final title is THE GLITCH, which revolves around the concept that characters in a video game are attempting to gather as many points as possible to win before they glitch.

It is crucial that one should not separate the character design and world-building process as two isolated components of the story, but rather together they drive the overall narrative story.

Character design questions:

“What discoveries does this character make?”, “What is the character’s mood intensity upon entering the scene?”, “What is the character’s mission?”, and “What does the character look like?”

World-building questions:

“How does the game start and end?”, “What is game setting? A card game, broad game, adventurous game?” and “What is the purpose of the game?”

The challenge during this process is to not only ensure coherency throughout the story, but to also balance the script and visuals by identifying elements needed to convey the main objective without incorporating too many unnecessary details.

Keeping in mind that not every action written in the script requires visual presentation and that every visual element presented must hold significant meaning that serves a purpose to the story.

This stage of pre-production is where one can preview the animated short before the production process by exploring different shot compositions, framing, staging, scene transitions, camera movements, scene events and timing.

I began this process by gathering inspiration and creating mood boards, which includes elements such as color and atmosphere to outlines the feelings I wanted to convey through the visuals.

Then I selected six main scenes from the final storyboard and created full-color style frames, which also finalized the character design.

As the title of the animated short being “The Glitch”, this inherently implies that the story revolves around elements that glitches.

I experimented with different glitch effects and developed a distinct glitch animation by combining the displacement map effect, the fractal noise effect, and expression codes from Joy Clay’s video “using expressions to glitch paths”.

Each scene with After Effect’s 3D workflow by manipulating 2D layers to be in 3D space with After Effect’s 3D cameras, which is also known as the 2.5D visual perception.

This workflow adds an extra layer of dynamic movement, lighting, and depth to the once flat 2D layer, this technique simulates a 3D look and serves to presents a more believable world to the audiences.

Scene that transitions are “a chance to build important connective tissue that brings the viewer through the story” (Nerdwriter1).

Therefore, different transition styles, such as fade in, fade out, parallel panning, scene glitching, and dynamic zoom, were tailored-made to intensify the narrative of the animated short and invites the viewer to enter the story world.

I realized that the original script was lacking context and needed refinement. Therefore, after four revisions, I eventually settled on the final script, which was then sent to be professionally recorded by a Brandon Jackson. After which, I was able to fine tune the timing for each scene according to the final narration.

This process includes rigging, animating, and stylizing the character.

The decision was made to use vector-base instead of raster-base illustrations to maxima flexibility and control during the rigging and animation process with Duik Bassel.2.

Character stylised by experimenting with different layer style options. The character’s color, highlight and shadow are also greatly affected by the environmental lighting of each scene and must be put into consideration during this final stage as the animation process comes to an end.

With the main animation complete, along with the narration by Brandon Jackson, the only final step is the adding the background music composed by David Walthall into the animation. This is the final stage of compositing all the different elements together before rendering out the final deliverable.