Asterias | Official Trailer | B.A Animation Production

In a world where Gods walk among mortals, Leo, a lost young boy, embarks on an adventure to find his way home. In doing so, he meets a quirky adventurer called Joe. Thus begins the adventure of this duo journeying in this strange and magical land.

Until they discover that Leo is being hunted.

Asterias is a proof-of-concept trailer for a serialized, 2D-animated TV show. It sits in the genre of fantasy, action and adventure, targeting the age group of kids 9-14. The artistic direction is inspired by the art style of Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005) and Netflix’s The Dragon Prince (2018), as well Studio Ghibli films. 

This 1 minute and 40 seconds trailer was written, directed, and animated entirely by a small team of four Bachelor of Animation students for our graduation capstone project.

Character Sheets

For the artistic direction of our character designs, we drew our inspiration from TV shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Voltron, and The Dragon Prince. We wanted our characters to have more realistic proportions and shading dependant on scene lighting.

Below are the early iterations of the character concept sheets.

Concept Art and Background Painting

We seeked out the challenging, yet beautiful painterly style that Studio Ghibli is known for. Interestingly enough, Avatar: The Last Airbender's art style was also inspired by Ghibli films, and the time had come for this chain of inspiration to cascade down to us. 

Credits:

As this production was undertaken by only 4 students, everyone contributed to all stage of the animation pipeline, from storyboards and layouts, to roughs, in-betweens and clean-ups. Each member had lead roles in specific areas, and they are as follows:

Director and Creator: Leighton Young

Producer, Editor and FX: Sean Yew

Character and Animation Lead: Kyla Gordon

CG Lead: Abraham Ye