Abstract:
The Impossible Thing
A short animated film
by Kelly Witt
For my thesis I am creating the animated origin story of a character I’ve been developing
called Custos. My thesis film will be the prologue to a bigger story I’ve been writing called Across and Over. It’s a story about the apocalypse, growing up, and the beauty of being alive. My thesis project:”The Impossible Thing”, focuses on a part of this story that occurred thousands of years before the start of the show. Keeping with the theme of being alive, Custos is a character all about exploring immortality and what it is to be alive. In the future I hope to direct the show I’m working on, and as I am quite new to filmmaking and writing it made the most sense for my thesis to be an animated film. I went into this project with the intention of gaining a better understanding of how the animation pipeline works by doing every task myself. For this film I acted as an animator, writer, storyboard artist, colorist, musician, character designer, compositer, layout designer, and visual development artist.
In the long term I aspire to become a director working on animated cartoons, but after I graduate I plan on seeking work as a layout artist or visual development artist. This film was also centered around creating as many layouts as possible to fast-track exploring my strengths and weaknesses before creating a proper portfolio. I am new to environment design and I wanted to use my thesis as an opportunity to push my limits in that field. Throughout the process of creating this film I improved my writing and storytelling ability and close to the deadline, I rewrote the beginning of my film. While I completed all of the work I planned on completing, the significant last minute changes I made to this film leave it unfinished for the time being. I plan on completing the additions to this project over the next 3 weeks. After the film is finished I will be submitting it into film festivals before posting it online for anyone to watch.
Artist Statement:
Kelly Witt is a visual artist and musician from southern California whose work is built on obsession, time and patience. Kelly mainly practices 2d animation, visual development, and environment design with the intention of becoming an animated cartoon director. Her work focuses on optimism, empathy and world-building with special attention towards shining light on beauty that can be found within terrifying or apocalyptic realities. Kelly aspires to use music and visuals to create an uplifting cartoon about magic and exploration to tell a bright story with dark undertones.