ANIMATION transformation 

a magical girl defeated a dangerous monster once again, but the mess she made forced the city to rise up in anger. what good is a hero that leaves the city behind in a mess and never shows their real self? seeing a little girl in the crowd look at her with fear in her eyes made the magical girl realise something worse than the mess she made; SHE became the monster, covered in blood. Out of pure guilt she transforms back to her normal form, high up in the sky, which she ends up falling down, painting another part of the city red.

For this school project we had to make a short animation about the subject 'Transformation'. This was in my 3rd year of MBO at SintLucas Eindhoven. It was a group project, and together we had to think of things that transform. We ended up choosing 'Magical Girl' as our subject. In Magical Girl animes/animations, a normal girl will transform into a stronger self, with magical powers. Usually their post-transformation outfits are very pretty with lots of details and colours; something I really like.

character designs made by me

After the two of us wrote the story, we started designing the characters. First I started designing a couple magical girl outfits. I really wanted to design something creative with lots of details, but I needed to make the design animator friendly. Having to animate really small details will take a long time. So I ended up making a mix of the designs above.

magical girl design made by me

This ended up being the final design. The colours are vibrant, and I personally think I did well with the design. It looks like a main character & it's easy to animate. After I finished this, my classmate could design the 'normal form' based on what I drew.

normal form design made by my classmate

They kept it very simplistic, but you could still see the resemblence of the magical girl and her normal self. When we both were happy with the designs, we started drawing the storyboard. 

storyboard drawn by me

Because we had our story written already, it was pretty easy to start drawing the storyboard. Because the animation couldn't be longer than 15 seconds, we had to really shorten everything in. (our animation ended up being just a little longer, 19 seconds to be exact, but our teacher said it was not a problem). I made sure the focus was on the most important part, not only the transformation itself, but also the reason to why the transformation happens. (this being, the dissapointed/scared kid in the crowd).

the first part of the animation

We divided the story board, so i animated certain parts and my classmate did the other part. The group consisted of 3 people (including me), but one of them was absent often, so sadly we couldn't finish the animation the way we wanted it to. The absent classmate had to (3D) animate the background and monster. Eventually at the last day of the deadline, they gave us the finished project with a background. We weren't completely happy with the end result but the teacher knew about this so we ended up getting a good grade & feedback for it after all :)

the 'finished' animation with 3D background