Crumpled Talent

This is a story about a child who started drawing at a young age. After being caught drawing in class their parent’s believe it’s time for her to give up her silly hobby and grow up.

This is my final end of year project for my course. Some people from the iAnti forums may remember this from its animatic form some months ago. Originally I was going to do a comedic narrative, but then I decided to change my mind and go for another approach. It’s easy to get people to laugh- it’s far more difficult to pull at heartstrings within 3 minutes. The idea came based from a lot of my friends who I’ve seen their parents want them to quit drawing because it’s only for children. So this is all dedicated to them. This is not about me. I was blessed with a lovely family and both my parents encourage me to go along with my art. Though the main character has some similarity appearances to my old persona design, it’s simply because the hair is by far the easiest for me to pull off, thus easier for me to keep consistent through cleanup.

Urrrrgh. You know I did enjoy animating this... and when I say animating I mean the key frames ect. Not the clean up. Clean up and inbetweening is the most boring, tedious thing I’ve ever had to do. Especially when working 7 straight hours pretty much only gave me 10 seconds worth of animation.

The ending can be interpreted in so many different ways. When I showed this to the people on iAnti they told me their different interpretations, it was pretty much blown away at how many different conclusions they had come to.

The song is Cryptic Sorrow and is royalty free and found at incompetech.com . The song was originally 8 minutes long. Somehow I managed to cut it down to 3 and still have it flow nicely haha.
Thanks to Frank, Jane and Terry for helping me. Also thanks to for making my preloader and replay button (and inbetweening a very small amount lol)... and Mitch and Nathan ;A; ilu guys <3

Reoccurring Questions
Did you use Flash?
Yes I did. NEXT QUESTION.

How long did you spend on this?
Too long. Around maybe.. April or something like that I did the draft/animatic. I didn't touch it again until I think July?

Did the child die in the end?
Like I said. The ending can be interpreted in many ways. Some people have thought it like a suicide and others saw it as them choosing to pursue their desire of art. Really it comes down to what you think of it as.

How come the adults don't have faces?
Cause of symbolism. The lack of a face is kinda like a lack of creativity and imagination.

What's your interpretation of the ending?
Mine is that the child chose to go with what they loved to do, even if the result was that their parents severed all emotional tied with them... idk something like that.