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A Person Sits Before A Tidal Wave

2d animation   experimental animation   collage

2024

2D, digital animation

Directed and animated by Sumin Kim

Thesis project from OCAD University

Logline

In order to save herself from a tidal wave, a person has to create something nice and strong.

[Click to expand each item below]

Preproduction

Preproduction

The 1st storyboard:

The 2nd storyboard:

The 3rd storyboard (final):

   A Person Sits Before a Tidal Wave was my thesis project from OCAD University.  As a student with only the final year left ahead, with the next step yet to be found, it felt like I was standing right before a new world.  That feeling of being in front of an unknown world made me want to look back on the world I used to live in, my past.  Therefore, when I was developing the concept of this project, I thought the theme of reflecting on the past and memories would be a nice fit for a thesis project.

A screencapture of a folder full of random images. The backgrounds of the images are erased for the use of photo editing.
The folder dedicated for photo collages, with images from my phone gallery.
A digital sketch of a close-up shot of a person. The person is wearing sunglasses, holding it with her hand. Photographs are edited on the lenses of the sunglasses.
The sketch that I made on the first day of the thesis class during the orientation.

   I had a clear visual direction that I wanted to explore in the project: I wanted to try using reflective or translucent surfaces(ex: glass, sunglasses or the surface of water) to reveal alternate scenes or perspectives, relating it to the theme of reminiscence. And for the alternate scenes, I wanted to add photographs for a spoonful of surrealistic flavour.

These images are the example shots of adding photographs to reflective and translucent surfaces.

   I did not end up actually doing this. As I was working on the storyboard and developing the concept, I ended up enhancing the surrealistic aspect in my project. The photo collage touch that was supposed to be on the reflective or translucent elements only was used more broadly as a component that the main character directly interacts with.

   I had 1-on-1 meetings with 3 professors with the first storyboard. From two of the professors, I got feedback that a giant cat appearing at the bottom of the water might confuse viewers. They suggested me to have the cat appear from the beach side, or have an ocean animal save the person instead of the cat. The other professor suggested that I explore surrealism in my project, since photo collage was in a very close relationship with surrealism.

   At first, I wanted to keep the cat, so I tried adding more of the surrealistic items so that the cat wouldn’t seem so weird. But later on, while I was making photo-collaged puppets, I created this very cute shark-head character! So I ended up putting this shark-head instead of the cat.

A photo-collaged puppet. It is a creature with a shark head, a clamshell, a back of the heand, and a bottle. The legs are composed with tree branches.
A photo-collaged shark-head puppet.

Colour notes:

Colour Practices:

   I had made a comic in a graphic novel course, and I liked the design of the blue character.  So I kept it as a reference for the character of this project.

   I wanted to keep the simple and fluid contour of the hair, and the lines filling in the area.

Character design sketches:

  A Person Sits Before A Tidal Wave is a single-channeled 2D animation about a person’s experience of encountering hardship and overcoming it. The plot focuses on a person being swept by a tidal wave and then getting out of the water eventually.

  The main concept of this project is unstableness, which is embedded in the film both in the plot and in visual features. The protagonist is unstable and fatigued as she fails to do what she wants to do. Visually, it was achieved by adding a sense of instability with colour, lines and scattered photographs in the scene. The colour changes according to the protagonist’s emotional state and position. Animated lines wobble and flicker from time to time, while they are supposed to be on the screen to illustrate the character’s internal turmoil. The scattered photographs, which are meant to be parts of photo collages, might be merely making a mess throughout the film. However, this project is not only about displaying unstableness. It is also asking questions about what the person would do about it. After the wave, when she is back to where she used to be, what is left with her?

  A Person Sits Before A Tidal Wave is inspired by my personal process when being lethargic and melancholy. I thought about those feelings regarding what I do when they get closer, and what I do when they arrive. This film is nuanced, gentle and reflective, to mirror the ways I get lost in my thoughts and the efforts I take to find my way back to a more stable reality. Through making this film, my hope is to connect with others who may struggle with their own questions of instability.

  In the personal experiences I used as the reference, memory took an important role. To represent memory, photo collage has been a crucial medium for this project. Photo collage, visually and technically, has allowed me to easily introduce various textures into the scenes. But as in the conceptual part, photo-collage has a significant role in bringing in ‘photo’ and ‘collage’. Photographs are a means of visual documentation, and they show a moment in the past. A collage is used when a person collects things to create another piece from them. The concept of collecting the document of the past and seeing and creating meaning from it was what I wanted to embed in this project.

  Photo collage also takes part in building up the surrealistic mood. Surrealism in this film provides a dream-like atmosphere. ‘Dream’, a vulnerable subconscious space, is where a person can face fear and cure it. This is depicted in the latter part of the film when the person submerges in the water. The strong orange and red colours suddenly disappear in the next scene, which is inspired by sunsets followed by dark nights. At nighttime, the person would fall asleep and recharge herself. And when the alarm clock rings, she would be dragged out of sleep, back to life again.