"enlightenment", procreate dream
“Enlightenment” is a story about a diligent cow who works in a large company. I made a short animation preview for my story. I am trying to use painting style on my animation, for my volcano part. The volcano eruption is a kind of metaphor for the key idea of the whole story. From the awakening of the cow by the alarming clock, I want to create an urgent and unexpected humor feeling.
"concept illustration", digital drawing with procreate
This is the concept illustration for my story. This illustration includes the storyline. A human, the protagonist (the cow), sees people as animals. From his view, he thinks of himself as a cow. This idea was inspired by the Chinese internet slang “社畜” (corporate slave) which directly translates to “social livestock”, a self-mockery of people working in large capitalistic companies that extract excessive work from laborers. These people work like machines ceaselessly with very limited resting time, which is a popular situation in especially East Asia. Then, some of them lose their own judgment ability and become numb to this vast system.
The story will start with the view of the protagonist, the cow, which means audiences will not know this is a human world. Audiences will assume this is a fantasy world, like an animal kingdom. As the development of the story, according to the hints, audiences will gradually realize that there are more and more strange parts and finally, they will find out that this is actually a human world and the protagonist in fact is a human. Then, the story reaches the climax. For the ending part of the story, I want it to be open, whether the protagonist finally realizes himself is a human or he loses himself in the system. As the name of this story, “enlightenment”, we don’t know the destiny of the protagonist.
"scene design", digital drawing with procreate
details of this drawing
In this concept drawing, I designed many hints to show that this character is living with a chaotic mindset and even becoming insane. I tried to create a quirky atmosphere, contrasted it with my funny and slightly silly drawing style. Firstly, the background photo of the character’s phone is his son, a baby cow. As we from the god's perspective, we know the character is a human being. However, from his phone background, we know from his view, that he sees all people as animals, like his son. Secondly, another hint is about the time. On his phone, the time is 8:04 in the morning. However, from the window, we know that actually nighttime. Thirdly, besides the direct contrast between the character and his reflection in the mirror, a cow, there is another hint about the distorted reality. In the mirror, behind the cow, the reflection on the window is the back of a human figure. Meanwhile, when the character is watching his phone, his reflection in the mirror is watching him. What will his reflection do to him? Take a photo for him?
For the character, I intentionally hide his front face from the audience. I want to prevent audiences from knowing the real human appearance of this character, or, this is even not a thing that needs to be considered.
