ANIMATION BRIEF

 ANIMATION PROJECT: 

The Afterlife

- Samael Martinez and Ruth Perälä

The Afterlife is a story about how the living human meets the dead. It’s a journey of a young girl finding herself in a place she clearly doesn’t belong in. On her journey we get to see things that normal living people could never even imagine existed if it wasn’t for stories and movies. What would you do if you happened to find yourself in front of the map of The Afterlife? 

The script and animatic can be found on Samael’s blog in: 

https://sites.google.com/view/samael-martinez-valladares/anim

Together with Samael I worked my best to bring this project alive. Our original idea was completely different, we were going to work on a story we had already created in the past with characters that we already had, but because the story consisted of so many complicated things I thought it would be better to come up with something completely new. That’s when I got the idea of doing something that has to do with the afterlife. 

Originally I wanted it to be a rather humorous story mixed with serious topics. There was talk about how the human girl would witness the shinigami, Name, talking to a headless man looking for a new soul to buy in order to be able to be reborn with a new, fixed body. 

”Name” is a Shinigami that happened to find an unused name sign lying somewhere in the streets of The Afterlife and thus decided to pick it up and due to the lack of creativity he has, he decided to keep it as it is. He’s quite a complex character, can show signs of having a hot temper but in the end he’s just trying to do his best as an employee at the store. 

”Uni”, otherwise known as ”fish boy” is a side character in the story. His name is Finnish and means ”Dream”, which I thought would be fitting for the theme we had. 

”Soul Seller”, otherwise known as a side character that might appear in the final animation. He sells ”fake souls” and stolen souls in the Black Market of The Afterlife. 

A guard side character.

I was also in charge of designing the place Name works at. I used traditional Japanese stores in Kyoto as a reference and played around with different colors that I felt like would fit our animation and ended up going with the one down below for the base design of the place. However I plan to switch things up a little for the final production. 

FINAL THOUGHTS:

This project started as a huge passion project for me. We had a lot of ideas together with Sam and a lot that we wanted to work with. I looked up a bunch of voice actors on fiverr and things were supposed to work out well all the way for the first formal submission. However, a lot of personal issues happened in my life that prevented me from being able to put in the effort and time that I had originally saved for the project and for that reason Samael did most of the work for the animatic. 

I am very happy with everything that he did for it, he worked extremely hard to put everything together in the end and I’m really grateful for it. 

I am disappointed in myself for not being capable of doing what I originally wished to do for this, but I also try to remind myself of the fact that I did what I could do given the situation I’m in right now. 

Hopefully working for the final product will be easier and life won’t bring any more unfortunate surprises in the way of things. 

Overall, I have a lot of faith in this project and myself as well as Samael and I’m glad we were able to start it together.