Anna Katayama
Character Animator
THE BOX (Cardiff Quick Draw 2023/ 48 hrs animation challenge - March 2023 )
I wanted to work on a project that would be seen by many people and I managed to find the Cardiff Quick Draw, a challenge to create an animated short film within 48 hours. It was a very exciting project to work on as it was screened in the Mini Cardiff Animation Festival (24th- 25th March 2023) and I went to watch it!!!
For this project, we were allowed to work in a team and so I invited a few of my colleagues from the same university I went with. Within the team of 8, we had 6 animators, 1 compositor/layout artist, and 1 sound designer. I worked as an animator as well as a producer, who made sure everyone knew their roles and the entire schedule of what needed to be done by when (Ruari Chisholm also helped me with organizing and producing).
In the end, we managed to complete the short film on time, regardless of the challenge being difficult because the theme of "mini" was not announced until the 48 hours countdown clock started ticking. And I really cannot thank the team enough for how helpful and willing they were to deliver this wonderful film!
*The left animation is the parts I worked on as an animator and the right image shows how our film was screened at the festival.
Football Project (freelance work for Thunder Hawk - January 2023)
This was a great opportunity to start as a fresh freelance animator creating 3 animations from a brief. These animations were for the youth football pathway agency pitch (promotion for young football players).
I have worked all from character designing to animating (including background). The fun part was to do the rough animation (figuring out the timing) in Adobe Animate and then cleaning up in Procreate. I used Procreate for clean up as it was just easier for me to draw clean lines with Monoline Brush then using another specific grainy brush in Procreate to shade them in.
The most challenging part of this project was to draw the backgrounds as my interest is to mainly work as a character animator. However, I managed to work this out by researching and using Real Madrid CF as a reference point. For background, I have done the sketches in Procreate and the cleaning in Adobe Illustrator (some cleans are from Procreate as well).
Can Snore Dance? (Competition submission for Secret Story Draw 2023 - worked in 2022)
This was a submission for Secret Story Draw, a competition for underrepresented ethnic animators and illustrators who are looking for opportunities in the creative industry in the UK (still waiting for the results which will be announced in early 2023).
The brief was to pick a story from the provided list (written by famous storytellers) and create an illustration or an animation based on it. I chose the one called 'My Monster is Rubbish', which was about a girl who was not looking forward to the 'fabulous talents', a show and tell day to show your monster's talent. Though all her monster Snore could do was sleep.
I had fun animating the part about how hopeless the girl gets forcing Snore to do something he clearly does not have an interest in. It was challenging to convey the characters' emotions and acting within 15 seconds (max duration for the animation) but I managed, in the end, by narrowing as much as I could to a few shots. I used Clip Studio Paint to do the animating and coloring, then the compositing was done in Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere.
