I used to ride a motorcycle. The feeling of riding a motorcycle was like flying on an airplane, really low by the ground. I mean, your feet are literally a few inches off from the ground when you are on a motorcycle. So, Flying and a motorcycle, I just wanted to make something joyful.

Characters-wise, I thought it’d be fun to write about a skillful but dumb boy who has a big crush on a girl and he can’t wait to express it. The girl is very cool and sharp. She is kind of interested in the boy but does not want to express it for whatever reason. Well, She probably knows the boy won’t be able to handle it. It’s all a disaster (and kind of cute).

Storyboards were done quite quickly in my sketchbook. Since I was working alone, I was able to move onto the rough-animation/animatic based on sketchbook thumbnails. During rough-animation, I adjusted all compositions, cut some scenes out. In editing, I changed around scene orders. Final color keys (right) are all based on drawings from rough-animation. I thought it’d be nice for you to see what changed over the process!

Can you tell which storyboards made it to the final? : )

These final keys are done based on a frame from rough animation. There was no clean-up storyboard phase so the process was kind of backward. Style-wise, I was looking for something impressionist-like, sketchy and looking-awesome-in-animation style (whatever that means). Then I thought of how Egon Schiele paints white around the figure on newsprints. I’m sure there are smarter people who can explain how our eyes are tricked by the value contrast. To me, White works just like adding a shadow behind a subject (adding depth and frame) I also tried to use negative space in various ways - sometimes as BG or mid-value.