For the second term during my first year at the Willem de Kooning Academy, I was assigned to produce and develop an educational animation. For clarification, not an explainimation with fixed illustrations, but with a more playful and interesting manner of explaining a topic utilizing narrative structures such as metaphors, symbolism and synonyms. I was provided a plethora of local news articles to pick from. I decided to go with an article about combating organized crime.

The first few weeks were primarily focused on conceptualizing what you want to tell, what kind of metaphors or symbolism's fit your narrative. After which, it was sketching and developing a storyboard integrating the before-mentioned narrative tools to reinforce the storytelling capabilities.

When it came to developing and deciding a style to the animation, I built moodboards to encapsulate what I was looking for. With that settled, I developed styleframes to solidify my choices and colors. As part of the process, during a painting class, we had to cut out a part of our collaborative giant painting and base our color palette from the sampled section.

With my picked news article, it already utilized a metaphor for organized crime and the futility of crime-fighting organizations by using the fictional Greek Hydra creature. That, when crime-fighting organizations combat and take out an illegal operation, the criminal organization rebound quickly and fix the issue's that allowed the organization to be damage in the first place. I took this concept and twisted it around to fit within my own definition and creative input. I re-applied the idea of the metaphor and merged it with my own idea. The same spirit, different metaphor. I developed my script and began experimenting and producing with the idea and style in mind.

For my eventual style, I decided to use a trick that I did during a painting session. Due to the lack of canvas, I had ripped the side of a plastic bag and used that as canvas. I love the way the material interacted with the paint, which gave me an idea to use this technique to provide my style with an unique flair. The first week of production was dedicated solely to producing the various assets necessary to animate using Illustrator, after which I imported it and added the necessary assets to finalize my preferred style for each asset.