What is the film about?

This animation was inspired by the song of a poem. The poem was written by a 10 yr old autistic boy called Benjamin Giroux. The first half of the film in b/w follows Ben’s story verbatim. In the second half, Ben’s friend Mia sings his words back to him, but from a neurotypical pov, showing him that’s it’s ok to be “Odd”. The aim of this film is to spread autistic acceptance, and show those with autism that they can achieve anything when friends & others accept they are autistic.

What influenced it?

From childhood I was always fascinated by cartoons and anime/manga, my top influences over the years have been;
Hajime Isayama and his 2006 manga Attack on Titan.
Alex Hirsch and his 2013 Disney show Gravity falls.
Rebecca Sugar and their 2014 Cartoon Network show Steven Universe.
Kaiu Shirai and their 2016 manga The Promised Neverland illustrated by Posuka Demizu.
Dana Terrace and her 2020 Disney show The Owl House.
I enjoy the many styles and stories each artist has used within their work, all together over the years has helped me develop my own style of illustration and animation. The diversity shown within their work has also given me confidence in my own stories and work.

A little background information...

When I heard the story of Ben and his poem I felt moved and connected to the poem’s words, I related to many parts of the story overall. After hearing the song I knew that this project will help spread the message of Autism Acceptance and allow those who have ASD to know that they are not alone. I knew making a video would be challenging as I had never made an animation as long as the song, but I wanted to help spread the kind message and use my animation and art skills to bring the song to life with an animated video.

How was the film made?

For the process of creating the I Am Odd Animation I started off with creating the character
designs in Procreate on my iPad as it is a software I was most comfortable with working in fast. After the character designs had been confirmed I started production on the animation. I chose to use Clip Studio Paint Ex for the animation itself and for the stages of storyboarding. For storyboarding I chose to keep my drawings rough and simple, this way I could sketch them out faster allowing them to be flexible for any change that might be needed. While sketching out the storyboard I had the song on repeat and the lyrics written down so I could follow along. After having the storyboards confirmed with a few touch ups to some parts the rough animation stage began.
I used pose to pose animation in all the shots that have movement, this allowed me to plan out the characters key poses before working on the extra movement. For the rough and final animation I animated in 24 FPS and animated on doubles, however in the rough there were less frames just in case any changes to the movement needed to be made. After inking and colouring the final animation following the rough sketches I moved into Adobe After Effects, from here I was able to add the motion blur and movements to the characters as they slide into shot. I added a few rim lights on some parts of the animation too, this was also created in After effects.