FURSONAL IDENTITY

Fursonal Identity is an animated documentary series I created for my Thesis project while attending DePaul University for my Digital Communication & Media Arts Masters degree. It explores the concept of identity in the context of the Furry Fandom, in which a person creates an animal character to represent oneself.

Each video is under 2 minutes in order to deliver the most amount of information in small bites.

Process

The original idea was to make this a motion graphic, but early in the process I decided to make this a documentary. One idea that would remain constant is the theme of identity and how a subculture has been affected by advances in communication.

CHARACTER DESIGNS

I had to redesign peoples’ characters into a simplified style to have them work in this animated documentary. The characters were built in Illustrator. Arms were added in After Effects.

SCRIPTING AND RECORDING

I came up with a series of questions to ask the 5 subjects so I could get their perspectives on why they joined the Fandom and how they felt about it spreading through social media. Once I collected enough data, I imported all the audio into Audition and created audio tracks under 2 minutes.

Storyboarding

After cutting the audio track, I created storyboards to plan out how to animate each episode. While some changes occurred during the process, the structure remained largely unchanged.

EXAMPLES OF SCREEN SHOTS

These are shots of a segment that talks about people using their talents to perform in the Fandom.

One of the subjects was interviewed over Skype and had a reverb that sounded different from the other subjects, so I animated his segments like he was in a chat window.

This illustrates the basic concept of the Fandom, which is combining yourself with animal characteristics.

FINAL OUTCOME

This project was well-received at my Thesis Defense and the panel was interested in seeing if there will be more. They also found it informative on a topic they had only a passing knowledge of.