Stroke Life: Four Stories (Collection of Short Films)
I worked on 'Stroke Life: Four Stories' with Stop Mo Studios from June 2022 to October 2022 as a freelance 2D animator and editor. The film consists of four different short films, each with different animation styles and each completed over two to three weeks. Each film tells the story of a stroke survivor, and each film visualises their story with a different style of hybrid 2D and stop motion animation.
I used Toon Boom Harmony to create rigged and hand drawn animation, and I also used After Effects to composite and edit shots and Premiere Pro to edit multiple of the films.
1) Kelly
This film tells the story of Kelly, as she describes how she deals with the consequences of her stroke and describes it as a consistent presence. We see this visualise in the film as a strange creature follows her, despite her attempts to ease it.
For the film, we animated 2D characters and composited them into different stop motion sets. I designed and rigged a human character of Kelly, including a front, three-quarter and side view and different outfits, and animated the rig in each shot. The key for this film was showing Kelly interact with the creature, and making the 2D animated characters feel like a part of the stop motion sets.
2) Rob
This film tells Rob's story, as he describes the feeling of loss and how his brain registers one side of his body more differently than before.
This film was inspired by charcoal animation, and the 2D animation uses brushes and repeated layers of animation to mirror this effect. The 2D animation for this film was all digital hand-drawn animation, completed in Toon Boom Harmony.
3) Wendy
This film tells Wendy's story, who describes how the impact of the strokes makes her feel less capable and older. We visualised this with animation of Wendy herself contrasted to animation of an old crone living in the woods, which she fears she is starting to become more like due to the stroke.
For this film, the style is more plain and open, focusing on other the key details of the characters and backgrounds. This film, like Rob, featured digital hand-drawn 2D animation, again completed in Toon Boom. I used After Effects to create camera movements throughout multiple shots.
4) After Stroke
This film has someone describe the feeling of a stroke, and how the impact can make them feel more tired and unable to do things they use to. The visual animation shows a kingfisher struggling to feed his partner, to represent this struggle after a stroke.
I created the two kingfisher characters with a rig in Toon Boom Harmony, with hand drawn wings to create the appearance of flight and take off. I animated the shots where we have a close up or still shots of the kingfishers.