Animations

My group animation project
Partner: Seonming Cheon

Concept map:

Artist's Statement:

For our animation, we chose a funny story from Hannah’s childhood about why her brother, Ethan, is afraid of chickens. Our animation shows how the story took place thirteen years ago at Hannah’s grandfather’s home, and how the fear still exists for Ethan today.

Synopsis: (Hannah’s memory)

Our grandpa used to let us throw chicken eggs at the side of his old ski motel. It was great fun, but eventually we ran out of eggs. There was a big fat chicken in the coop that wouldn’t move, and I knew it had eggs under it, but I didn’t want to go near it. So I told my younger brother, Ethan, to take a broom and poke it until it got off the box. He did, and it flew into his face, scratching and pecking, before it jumped off the box. After that, I took the eggs and continued to throw them at the side of the motel. Ethan was scarred forever. Now when my mom asks him to go give food to the chickens we have at our house, he throws it into their pen and runs away.

As we heard people discussing their ideas around the room, we both had the idea to tell funny stories, since all the other ones in the room seemed so serious. We wanted to make people laugh with our animation. Hannah enjoyed telling the story, and we both thought that the story of how Ethan became afraid of chickens would be both funny for an audience and fun to animate.

We chose a simple animation style, because we wanted people to focus on the story, and we thought that it would be more humourous if the story was told very simply. We wanted to make it seem like it was drawn from Hannah’s childhood memory. The characters are simple cartoons, done in black and white like they were drawn with a pen, and the only colour is in some added supplemental shapes, like lightbulbs and eggs. The colour makes those items stand out from the characters, since they are special.

The music and sounds we picked for the background are very light and happy, which goes along with the simple style of the animation. We chose happy sounding music so that it would seem like a cute little story, when really it is not. In addition, we added some sound effects for added humour.

We have multiple instances of text popping into the animation. We have animated the text to go along with the story. Hannah is a graphic design student, so of course text was going to be integrated in. We thought that the text helped move the animation along and helped with clarity, in case someone didn’t understand the story. We opted not to do a voiceover, so people could hear the music and just read the text on their own.

We hope you enjoy the story of how Ethan became afraid of chickens as much as we did. 

Why my brother is afraid of chickens

Hannah's Half