Mouse & Caterpillar is a short animation film that I made during my education at the HKU.
It is about a mouse, named Annie, who lives with her grandmother.

The themes of this film is about responsibility, care, family and loss.

The story once originated from a piece of music that I wrote. Immediately, I pictured some images in my head. They were images of a crying little girl who was very sad, because she couldn't catch the bus to school.

From this idea I started to form a story and images. To make it more challenging, I worked with anthropomorphic figures instead of human figures. The reason is that I find them cuter myself and I had the idea to do something with butterflies.

After some brainstorming I came up with a story about a crying mouse being taken away by a butterfly. In addition, I wanted story with depth in which I want to play with emotional layers. So I thought, what is a good reason for the mouse to cry? 

The first drafts

These are some of the very first sketches of Annie.

The main inspiration for the design and the name are the childhood photo's of my girlfriend. 

Finally the final development of the sketches into digital art.

Background

For the development of the background, I took inspiration from the Hobbit house mix with the house of Kikker (a Dutch children books).

It was important that you could see the sun coming up from the right, because the east is on the right. 

Also, the tree is an important element, otherwise the caterpillar couldn't hang as a pupa. My grandma said that it is also a beautiful metaphor for the tree of life. 

So this is how it looks when you put it all together!

Unfortunately, because of the limited budget and time. I had to cut time and toke out the colors of the characters.

Though I made sure that the characters still stands out. So I made them a little bit darker than the background and finished it off with some highlights.

Story

During the writing process I knew I wanted to chose one background. The reason is that I wanted to save time and focus more on the animation.

I asked myself: How do I make the movements and presentation of the narration come across clearly to the viewer? So most of the time I dealt with staging and timing. I believe you can tell a lot in a short time with a single background and strong animation.  It was extremely important that the narration and the animation went well together with the music. It had to support each other.

Alternative version

As this film is a school project, there was always room for feedback and improvement.
So I made an alternative version in which the use of color is extremely essential.
I also did an alternate narration of the story. So not in a single shot with 1 background. But with different shots to give the film more dynamics.