The Girl and The Ghost

The Girl and The Ghost is my major project for this year. I was working on it for 6 months.

This short story is about friendship, loss, and moving on. I'm creating a comic about these characters and this animation is a very quick summary of how they met and became friends.

Backgrounds and Characters

I designed all the backgrounds and characters for this animation. I didn't have much time for it but still, it's my favourite step. I tried to show fear, sadness and joy using colour. You can see that the first scenes are bright and gentle, later on, the house has strong, dark colours and the last scene is fully dominated by blues lightened by fog or stars.

The characters are very simple but still, I was changing their colours for them to fit with every scene. Also as the only animator on this project, I didn't want to complicate things. I decided to draw more detailed backgrounds and simple but interesting characters.

Storyboard

I did most of the scenes in line with my storyboards but while animating, I had to cut a few parts as it was becoming too long for the time I had.

Animating

I was working in OpenToonz as I didn't have access to Toon Boom or other professional animation software. It was a challenging process but thanks to saving my files every 5 mins and good organisation I finished my project on time. 

The hardest shot to animate was one of the last. It wasn't in my storyboard but I felt I need this short camera movement here. The moment where Felicity and her ghost sister look at each other is very important and I wanted to make it emotional and tender. I asked for help to get a 3d animation of this scene to make it easier but still drawing this frame by frame took me around 12 hours. 

Comic

My animation is based on comics that I am continuously creating and sharing on Tapas. These episodes are short and slowly are going to form the story known from my animation. In the animation, I had to be fast but with my comic, I explore the house and its guests a lot more.

You can find the comic here: https://tapas.io/series/The-Girl-and-The-Ghost/info

Cooperation

I also need to add that apart from designing and animating I got help from my friends and the music, sound effects, and voices of Mom and Ghostie were created and recorded by my friends. Also, the 3d animation that I mentioned before was made by my boyfriend. 

Without all those people my animation would not look and sound like it does.

Thank you for reading about my animation!