Rationale

For our Kaitiakitanga project, we explored the idea of economic sustainability in today's society. Through our animation we wanted to convey the message that wealth is not sustainable. We chose to represent how easily someone can crumble from privilege to poverty by telling a story about the downfall of one man.
 At the beginning of the animation, the man sitting on the step is recently unemployed and has nowhere to live. To convey the slow change and decline we decided to represent the image as a time-lapse, having the environment subtly change alongside the protagonist to reflect his situation. In after effects we mostly played with opacity to give an impression of the gradual change you'd see in an extended time-lapse, almost with a stop motion effect.
He is seated with a box of his old possessions, all of which are useless to him now, to show the frivolity and the warped priorities of our society.Throughout the story, his living situation, wellbeing and the environment around him continues to decline, while the rift between the rich and the poor widen. We wanted to highlight the widening gap between the classes that is present in society, and show how many people ignore those who are in poverty. By using overdramatic silhouettes of happy people  moving through the window  contrasting with the main character, conveying the problematic issues surrounding economic stability and the obliviousness of those in wealth to the issues just sitting on their doorstep.

Final

Final submission for the Digital Illustration and Moving Image assignment.

Video Draft

This video is thirty seconds long and felt too fast once rendered out of after effects. We plan on extending it to 1:00 minute as it makes the changes more gradual and gives the audience more time to observe the events  to get the full impact.

Man Animation

Looking at the animation of the man separately. By slowly altering his possessions and appearance as he spends more time on the streets. After animation we realized the entire size of the figure was too small, so used a "Null" to constrain the proportions while re-sizing.

early in animation

half-way

towards the end

Animation Screenshots

Screenshots from one of our final versions of the story, with working on the side.

Background People

We wanted to include people in the window to work as a contrast of the poverty outside, and also show how people blatnently ignore the problem.

We went with silhouettes as we didn't want to detract too much from the central image, and used over-dramatic facial expressions to represent their contrasting success quickly to the audience.

Transitions of Items

Due to the time-lapse effect we're going for all of our items had to be altered to show the slow deterioation of the environment.
These are the best examples of that process:

The box of the protaganist's possessions

The poster on the wall

Garbage around the area also had several variations during the story as well.