TCOA (2024)
TCOA_animv5.mp4Origin
The Curse of the Albatross (TCOA) was another passion project developed from a high school idea when I was intrigued by the poem: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It tells the story of a mariner who shoots an albatross without knowing they are a sign of good luck, and in turn curses his entire ship to suffer the consequences of doing so. As a way to repent for his mistake, they tie the dead albatross around his neck as a sign of guilt and from then on, it became a metaphor for a psychological burden.
Over the course of a year I expanded my own version of this metaphor through comics, storyboards, animatics, and finally an animation to tie it all together.
Comic
Using aspects from the poem and folklore surrounding Japanese tengu who, in some variations, protect mountains and forests, I continued to fully fledge out my initial story from high school. In TCOA, sailors who die at sea are reincarnated as albatross whose jobs are to guide ships safely along their journey. By doing so, they are able to help other sailors avoid the same misfortune and maybe even correct any misdeeds they have done in their past life to continue on to reincarnating as humans.
Utilizing this as my focus, I created the comic below explaining the premise of TCOA as if I were creating a webtoon series.
ashley_TCOA_final.pdfStoryboard
At the same time I was making this comic, I was also making a storyboard based around this story in another studio. Through this storyboard I was able to explain what happened before the comic and why our main character woke up to a talking bird.
TCOA_storyboard.pdf
Storyboard Animatic
After creating the storyboard thumbnails, I decided to turn them into a 3-minute animatic where I was able to combine and tweak them to make the story more fleshed out. The animatic also allowed me to test how well my story was communicated by solely relying on showing and not telling, while also messing around with the timing and spacing.
ashley_TCOA_storyboardAnimatic.mp42D Animation
After the storyboard, I began working on a short 2D animation inspired by animation memes I would always watch on YouTube when I was younger. Animation memes are essentially very short animations that go along to music and are made to be reiterated by other artists. Taking this chance to fulfill a dream I had as a kid, I decided to animate what happens right after the storyboard.
Music: dumb dumb - mazie
TCOA_animv5.mp4