Although Michaela Jaé felt out of place growing up, she never let it dim her light. Without much media representation of trans people, Michaela Jaé looked to classic stories like Cinderella and found parallels to how she wanted to live her own life. This led her to creating her own characters, like Pose's Blanca Evangelista, to represent identities she never knew when growing up. Her advice to the next generation is the same: if you don't see stories that represent your identity—write your own. Watch episodes of The Adulthood—an animated series about finding your way in the modern world: https://www.google.com/chromebook/the...
Directed by: Danielle Oexmann Series
Animation Creative Director: Justin Leibow
Animation Director: Daniel Cordero
Executive Producer: Angela Foster
This was a very special and interesting project I had the great opportunity to design and animate fully. I really loved coming with ideas that would convey Michaela's thoughts and experiences in a meaningful and interesting way. The colours had to fit Google's palette and I added two extra tones representing the trans flag. The visuals swing between abstract symbolism and stylized human characters and elements.
Here are some of the styleframes I did for this project before jumping into animation:
There were also some unused concepts and designs, that were later rethought and refined:
The storyboarding process was pretty intense, with lots of different iterations until we got to the final stage where we were happy about the story been represented in the rich way. You'll notice some scenes that changed later on as I was animating and putting together an animatic.
