Stowaway

Together with two animators from my major, Dione Forty (direction, character design, animation, drawing backgrounds) and Sabrina el Bairi (storyboarding, animation, drawing backgrounds), we made a 2D animated short film. Unfortunately it's not completely finished, we are planning to finish it during the plusweeks. I mainly worked on the animation and the design of the backgrounds.

Summary
The story is about a woman; a stowaway who get's caught by sailors on the ship, who happen to be not so friendly. They hold the belief that women on ships bring bad luck, and as the storm becomes stronger they want to get rid of her as soon as possible. They tie her down, push her on the plank and stab her. As she falls and sinks, she get's a second chance in life and transforms into a mermaid. As she emerges from the water, her eyes fall on the ship of her murderers. Will she let it rest? Will she take vengeance?

Less-than-human
The woman is considered less-than-human by the sailors. Within their worldview, even the gods see women as less worthy and it is justified to kill them.

More-than-human
After her death, the woman comes back to the world of the living as a mermaid. Now, she is partly human, partly sea creature. She has become more-than-human to regain her humanity.

Becoming-with
When the woman became a mermaid, she became one with nature and with herself.

I researched the movement of water. Like slime, water is like an entity, and it has it's own character. You can have influence on water, and the water has influence on you. It can be calm or wild. It flows along or it pushes back. I wanted to translate this in the animations.

I designed how the backgrounds were going to look like. We wanted to focus on textures rather than shadows, and wanted to have a specific color pallette.
These are the backgrounds from the film that I drew: