Boyterfly: Are all butterflies actually boys?

Overview

What’s your movie called? Why are you telling this story?

My movie, titled Boyterfly, is about a boy and some butterflies on a path. The butterflies land on the boy and then he transforms into a butterfly himself, leaving the audience to question whether this is some sort of perpetual cycle. The title of the project comes from the title of a poem that I wrote about 4 months ago, called “Butterfly Boy.” I would always jokingly call it Boyterfly, instead, so I drew on that and my odd obsession with butterflies in order to create this project.

Design Choices

Why did you make your artistic choices (Typeface, color scheme, etc)?

To be perfectly honest, most of my artistic decisions occurred by happenstance. I turned the stage grey because I was having trouble getting the letters of the title to fade the way I wanted them to, but then decided that I liked it. The font is Times New Roman because I animated the entire thing before I realized I hadn’t thought about font, but at the same time I also kind of like it as Times New Roman. The butterfly is purple because I liked the color and that specific asset was the only one in the file that I liked enough to use.

What audio did you use? Why this audio?

All of my audio came from Bensound.com. To find my it, I just searched “royalty free music” on Google and then listened to a bunch of the songs that were on the first non-ad site. Then I downloaded six of them based on whether or not I felt that they worked with the vibe I was trying to achieve in my animation.

How did you locate assets for your animation?

All of the artistic assets that I used in the project were acquired from Freepik.com. I essentially did the same thing here as I did for the audio in that I searched “free vector image” on Google to find the site. The main difference here was that I knew specifically what I wanted in terms of images, so I searched for things like “boy walking” or “road” or “butterfly” rather than just digging through all of the free files on the website.

Workflow

What problems or frustrations did you encounter? How did you solve them?

I honestly didn’t have too many major frustrations over the course of this assignment. The few minor issues I had revolved around some weird things that happened when I was moving things on the timeline. For example, the part where the butterflies are swarming the boy and they bounce back a bit was not intentional. However, I couldn’t figure out how to change it and I decided that it actually improved the effect I was going for, so I left it in. In other words, I solved my outlook rather than the problem itself.

If you could do it over, how would you modify your workflow?

If I could do this whole project over again, I would gather all of my assets first, rather than waiting until I needed them. This basically wasted a lot of time that could have been allocated to perfecting some of the other aspects of my animation. I would also start collecting my layers in folders much earlier as that was essentially the moment where I was able to increase my animating pace.

Credits

The walking boy sprite that I used belongs to the user “brgfx” on Freepik.com.

I acquired the background and the butterfly from Freepik.com, as well, but from the user “freepik.”

All audio files were obtained from Bensound.com and were the property of the site.