CONcept

I decided to make AR stickers that I can stick to different places in Annecy and in Rotterdam for people to interact with.

This project was also an opportunity for me to finally start creating work for a passion project that I’ve been working on for some time now that’s only been in the concept phase until now.

The project is a short film about a little girl called Nugget, who lives in a junkyard and likes to take care of the frogs that live in the polluted water of the ponds in the area. She stumbles into a magical mirror that allows her to look into different dimensions. Once the mirror is activated, she is not only able to look into dimensions herself, but she also becomes visible to the occupants of the dimensions she is looking into.

For this project I decided to animate the part where she finds the mirror. She stumbles into it by chance, while she was looking for one of the frogs that jumped out of their terrarium. She finds the frog walking onto the mirror glass and when she reaches out to grab it, she realises that that is no ordinary mirror. She cannot see her own reflection in the mirror, instead she can see through the mirror into a strange world she’s unfamiliar with (our world/ the “real” world). I chose this scene specifically because it’s Nugget’s first contact with the mirror so she is very confused about what’s happening. In a way she’s sort of interacting with the audience, observing them carefully trying to understand while they do the same. Like two sides of the same coin.

SKETCHES / CONCEPT ART

Nugget is not a new character that I created specifically for this project. I originally made Nugget when I was 15 years old back in 2018. Since then I have made so many sketches and illustrations of her and my style as well as her design have gone through so many changes over the years. But even though she’s one of my oldest characters I’ve never had the chance to work with her on a project or make animations of her before now. So I was very excited to finally bring her to life.

STORYBORDS

1st iteration – sketch

2nd iteration – Digital

3rd iteration

4th iteration

ANIMATIC

ANIMATION

Process

Final animation – lineart

Final animation – Color

stickers

test – AR software + sticker application

Before putting them out into the city I wanted to test if the stickers are recognizable to the software and if it’s able to scan them properly so I put one up in my room to test it out.

First functioning sticker in Annecy

During Annecy I brought the stickers with me so that I could put them up all over the city around the area where the animation festival would be held. Unfortunately the first few went to waste because they didn’t work properly. I printed the stickers on transparent paper instead of white not knowing what the difference is and when I tried sticking them to surfaces with a darker color background the design blended in with the background and was unrecognizable to the application. So in the end this is sadly the only fully functioning sticker I managed to put up in Annecy.