ASM KAWSAR/ MA Coursework / 2D Animation Development
MA Coursework · Advanced 2D Animation
Jhilik O Mini 2D Animation Development — a short film, team project, led as Project Manager & Co-Director
A two-minute, dialogue-light animated short about a young girl, Mini, who wanders off chasing a bird and finds her way home again by the glow of a firefly — built end to end as a team, from storyboard through final compositing.
The film follows Mini, a young girl who spots a bird from the car window on the way to her grandparents’ house and slips off to chase it into the forest behind the property. As dusk falls and she loses sight of the path, the story turns on a single small moment of reassurance — a firefly’s glow in the dark — before her family finds her and brings her home. The whole piece runs about two minutes across roughly twenty-three shots, told with restrained camera movement and no dialogue, so the emotional beats carry entirely through animation, environment and light.
As Project Manager and Co-Director on the team, the work spanned storyboarding and animatics, character animation, compositing and camera movement, environmental lighting, and overall production coordination — with ambient sound recorded and integrated afterward to reinforce spatial realism and emotional tone.
Design Thinking
Process
Visual Development
The visual language emphasizes atmospheric minimalism — backgrounds are simplified to control depth and guide emotional focus. Colour progresses from warm daylight tones to cooler nocturnal gradients, with the firefly’s glow developed as a controlled light source that influences the surrounding space like organic bioluminescence, rather than a flat digital light effect.
Character Design
Mini’s turnaround, built from rough construction through clean line to full colour, front and back. Proportions were kept soft and slightly rounded to support expressive, non-verbal body language, since the film carries its story without dialogue.
Storyboard & Direction
Twenty-three shots were boarded and sequenced before animation began, from the opening highway approach through Mini breaking away to chase the bird, to the tense forest sequence where she loses her way. Camera movement stays restrained throughout — slow lateral pans and subtle zooms — favouring observational presence over dramatic camera work.
Reference & Final Frames
Key poses were staged and photographed by the team as physical reference before animation, then carried through to finished, fully composited frames — culminating in the film’s quiet resolution: Mini found by her family, and the firefly whose glow led her back.
The complete 80-slide final presentation for MOT-5208: Advance 2D Animation Production — every stage of the post-production pipeline for Jhilik O Mini, from rough cut to final grade.
Before any team production work, the foundational animation principles were studied and practiced individually — each exercise taken from a rough construction sketch, through a clean stroke pass, to a finished coloured frame. This workflow — sketch, clean, colour — is the same pipeline later carried into Mini’s character animation above.
