Crystal Zhou

For this project, I focused on reflecting how I’ve changed since I entered college, both mentally and physically. I feel that changing my major to Design and Technology played a significant part in me becoming more mentally stable. I don’t have much experience in this major, so I’m more motivated to learn compared to when I was studying Studio Art. I don’t hate art, but I started losing passion because I felt stuck and cared too much. Now that I’ve taken a break from it, I’m slowly finding the fun in doing art again. Therefore, I tried out animation for this project. I created a simple character (QiQi) and animated it to represent my inner world. QiQi takes this journey through time to show the different stages of me. To create this idea of traveling across time, I included works from both the present and the past, some of which were created based on my mental state at the time.

I drew storyboards before actually animating to plan out the shots and the story. It was helpful to have everything organized beforehand. I was also inspired by the artist Ivan Zulueta’s video Leo es pardo. At the beginning of the video, a girl in white wakes up and goes on with her day, but there are traces of another girl in leopard print. Later, the girl in leopard print comes home, and the girl in white is scared and disappears. The leopard print girl goes to bed. They are different versions of the same person, and the loop ties the story together. This inspired me to show myself drawing QiQi at the end of the video to tie everything together.