My animated graduate film is called Drowning in English. It tells the story of a girl who goes to a university full of fish who communicate only through bubbles, something the girl cannot do. The film comes from my own experience as an international student when I first arrived at university, struggling to understand English and feeling lost in trying to understand the people around me or express myself clearly. It felt as if I had lost my usual way of sensing and understanding the world around me.
The backgrounds of the film were created with coloured pencil on paper, while the animation was drawn digitally in Clip Studio Paint, composited in Adobe After Effects, and edited in Adobe Premiere Pro. Although the animation was created digitally, I tried to preserve an imperfect hand-drawn quality to match the backgrounds, creating a surreal world and expressing a sense of instability.
