OUT
OUT is a short animated documentary created in my sophomore year at Pratt Institute about five of my friends and their experiences coming out of the closet. The film has been featured in screenings at ASIFA East, FlameCon, NewFest, the QuickDraw Animation Society, and Queer City Cinema.
When I began working on this project, I had very few pre-concieved design notions other than brush styles. I wanted to let my friends decide the rest. I interviewed each person, and trimmed the audio so all of the pieces told a compelling story.
After that, I had to stylize each of my friends into simplified characters that would be easy to animate. I broke each one of them down into simplified shapes that I felt best illustrated their silhouettes, and gave them color palettes inspired by the pride flags they felt best described their identity.
Once I had figured out their designs, I drew some thumbnails for the storyboard.
One of my initial concepts was to stylize significant words from the interviews onscreen, but after a round of critique, it was decided that the words might distract from the rest of the animation. Still, I wanted something to emphasize significant moments, so I turned to color experimentation instead.
I animated the first shot using my new concept- each character would start the same color as the background, but they would fill with color when they came out and accepted who they were. However, I eventually felt like it would be strange to have all of the straight characters in color while only the queer characters were colorless in the beginning- it was other-ing in a negative way. So I decided to alter my approach. All characters would have tinted gray color palettes to start with, but only the characters coming out would fill with color, marking a triumphant reveal of their identity.
CREDITS
Voice Cast: Marleny Musto, Alistair Rice, Tené Deveaux, Rachel O'Connor, and Jasmine Thomas
Storyboards, Animation, Character Design: Roscoe Rappaport
Music: Enthusiast by Tours from Free Music Archive
