I give the audience insight into this matter through having them follow me through the story to see my perspective. It effects me as a part of my life that is still changing and it moves my audience through the music and illustrations. I keep the focus of the scene close to me and use frame by frame for the most significant scenes to properly display the emotions of the scene. 

I wanted a lot of frame by frame to keep the story moving smoothly, as well as to get the emotions to be expressed well. I used the adobe apps to properly illustrate and animate the story, as well as mixing an emotional piece that gave the right emotion of the scene. I created elements in after effects, such as the phone, to surprise the audience and the voice wave to give a connection to the voice they hear. This necklace appears after I receive a package from my brother all the way from Japan. I am shown wearing it through the rest of the animation, showing that it is a way I keep my brother close to me. In real life, I typically wear it for anxious or stressful days to give me comfort. He gave me this yen coin and told me to put it on a shoelace. He said that children in Japan wear it for good luck. After some research I found that the coin itself is also used to bring good connections between people, which made me feel like it brought me even closer to my brother, despite how far apart we really are in miles.

I started this project with storyboards and mixing my music. I took 4 songs that I had an emotional connection with to help tell the story to get the response I wanted. I started with a music box to represent the childhood portion. I used instrumentals that are typically not associated with these songs. I also played a spoken word over the growing up montage to help tell how I felt at that time. 

I then went into Illustrator to illustrate all of my characters and frames. Because I was doing frame by frame I had to go back and forth between Illustrator and Animate throughout the project. 

I wanted the backgrounds to be simple so you could focus on the characters, however, there were two scenes that I felt were more important. So for those scenes I went into Photoshop to create more detailed backgrounds to emphasize the emotions. 

I wanted to surprise my audience at the end of the animation, so I cut the music abruptly to the sound of a phone ringing. I animated in After Effects using shapes and drop shadows mainly. I then also made an audio wave to display as a voice mail played. I used the radio spectrum effect and manipulated the frequencies to get the look I wanted.

I put all of my illustrations into Animate to make it frame by frame. I used motion tweening in the scene below to make the illusion that the camera was panning up. I had the ground and characters come from top to bottom. I exported each scene when completed before importing them into Premiere Pro. 

In Premiere, I placed all my clips together. For two scenes I had to do a bit of editing. The scene below I needed a cross fade to transition smoothly between the two shots. I also had a scene where I had to make keyframes and change the positions to make the camera push in. 

Overall, this was a passion project in a way for me. I wanted to share the experience I've had growing up without my brother and to give me hope we can be together again some day. I wanted my audience to feel what I feel and have felt. I used music and certain camera shots to try to get them to feel the same emotions.