We (Charlie, Janice and I) were tasked to create an animation expressing our opinions on social media and how it effects our generation; therefore, we created a video using dark humor to express how people get "sucked into" their devices.

The main idea of our animation is for our main character, Harrison, to text an octopus emoji, then for several tentacles to grow out of his phone, and suck him into it without the other passengers noticing due to their phone addiction. In our film, people who are looking at their phones would be black sillouettes; while they were not, they would be colored in. To make the people look more interesting, we would only give the sillouettes light on their body from their phones, to break up the solid black crowds in the backgrounds. Besides the people, the train cars would be greyscale.

After coming up with an idea, we had to design Harrison's look: at first we were experimenting with giving him a hoodie. This way, when he was black and white, the viewer could only see his white dot eyes with the rest of his face in shadow. We then wanted to make him stand out more, so we gave him a fedora with a yellow feather in it (this feather would stay in color, yellow, throughout the film, because we thought it would be fun to make it burp out of the phone at the very end of the film).

The second step of the process was storyboarding: we would draw on note cards depicting the actions in each scene. It originally started with Harrison, entering the train from a back view, looking down the train.

From a side (two dimensional) perspective, he would walk down three train cars until he found a seat, while looking down at his phone for the whole time. While walking in the first car, the audience would see emoji blurbs coming out of his phone. During his walk through the second cart, he would crash into another person, whom is also on their phone. Eventually, they changed directions. They wouldn't notice each other, yet the other person's arm would fall off after the two people would start walking in different directions.

On the third car, finally, Harrison looks up from his phone and turns toward the camera in full color (the background is still greyscale). He would notice the people sitting on benches on both sides of the train. They were all on their phones. Harrison also noticed the eyeball plants coming out of each person's phone. They moved lifelessly from side to side, watching everyone. When the eyeballs were on a black background, those areas would appear to be white. When they are on a white background, those parts are black. This gives the eyes a not-from-this-world look.

At this point, Harrison sits down (at a front view of his row of seats) and an octopus emoji blurb comes out of his phone (in the same style as before).

Then, we cut to see Harrison's perspective, where several tentacles come out of his phone, wrap around him, and break through the train walls. The next shot would be outside of the train to see the tentacles smashing Harrison on the ground while the train is moving.

We then go back into the train to see Harrison being sucked inside of the phone. The other passengers, who had not noticed Harrison's monster, look up to see a phone on what used to be his seat, and would become colored-in. They shrug and look back to their phones (back to black). Harrison's feather (from his fedora) comes out of the phone, and falls delicately down to the train floor without anyone noticing.

We did not finish this project because we focused far too much on detail rather than getting things done. To make the film as complete as possible, we got rid of the tentacles smashing around Harrison outside, the feather sequence, and the additional emojis (not including the octopus emoji- this is a very important part of the story). Additionally, when the people look up to see Harrison's phone without a user we had to keep them black and white because the color would have taken too long to animate; it triples the time spent on a single sequence due to the amount of layers created and filled in.

Out of the essential scenes, we did not finish the scenes where Harrison sits down and sends the octopus emoji as well as when Harrison gets sucked into the phone by the Kraken. Therefore we added the storyboard sequences to, hopefully, give the audience hints at what happened between finished scenes.

We were also not communicating well during the process, so when Harrison is walking down the cars, him and the other person are in full color. This worked out because it shows what the characters look like from an outside viewer.