Love yourself

Initially, I only had the core message I wanted to convey—“show up for yourself”—but I didn’t have a clear direction for turning it into a narrative. I discussed ideas with Megan and also considered the skills I wanted to develop through this project, such as creating animated pieces for my portfolio and building an interactive narrative.

During the brainstorming phase, I explored different concepts with guidance from Megan, including symbolic ideas such as showing a plant growing. This process led me to the idea of cleaning up a room as the central narrative. I chose to keep the story within a single scene so I could focus more on developing the scene and refining the story.

Storyboarding was particularly challenging, especially for the second part of the project. For the first part, I focused on creating a reflective sequence around the idea of “where does the time go,” implying that watching the reel itself contributes to that lost time. I shared my storyboard with Megan and revised elements that felt unclear or out of place. Since I wanted it to resemble a reel and it was my first time working in that format, I also sought guidance on designing for a phone resolution.

For the second part, I struggled for a while with how to structure the experience. I had established the core idea of a messy room and the objective of cleaning it, but I was unsure how to translate that into a clear sequence. Feedback from my peers played a key role during this stage, as they suggested different approaches and encouraged me to first create a rough version of the story.

Some suggestions included adding branching paths, but due to time constraints and this being my first time creating a game, I chose not to pursue that direction and instead kept the experience linear.

I created the animations for the first part using Adobe After Effects. I aimed for a high level of polish, so I shared my work with Megan and incorporated her feedback. She pointed out even small details, which I was able to refine and improve.

For the second part, the animations were done in Blender. These were primarily transitional animations, such as objects entering the screen or the phone moving down, thinking, cooking, washing dishes, notifications, calls, etc., etc supporting the flow of the interactive experience.

For this stage, I asked Megan and a few of my friends to go through the experience and share their feedback. Most of the feedback pointed out minor grammatical and spelling errors, which I corrected. Overall, the response was positive.

Some suggested adding background music to enhance the ambience of the experience, and a few minor adjustments were made to the animations based on their input.