Sarah Wellman

Hi There!

My name is Sarah Wellman, (a.k.a. swell) and I am a designer, illustrator, and animator who is passionate about telling stories through motion design! I specialize in design for motion and am a lover of all things colorful, fun, and whimsical. I am currently finishing up my Masters degree in Motion Media Design at SCAD and I previously received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Motion Design from Ringling College of Art & Design. 

I hope you enjoy checking out my work and some of my process!

This short film titled “Home Sweet Home,” is my capstone project to complete my M.A. in Motion Media Design at SCAD.

The brief of this project was completely open ended, and I love to tell stories through my work whenever I can, so I decided to make a short film about me and my cat, Juno. Although it was a challenge to complete the project in a time crunch and with very little help, I found the process of producing this film extremely educational and rewarding. From concept & storyboarding, to design & animation, to compositing & editing, the entire project was completed in the last ten weeks of my Masters program.

For this film, I wanted to focus on the idea of home. The film is centered around a character and her cat and follows them on a journey to find what home means to them. It starts with them being evicted from their current home and packing up their things to begin their journey and shows them exploring and traveling to different places until they find the right fit for them. In the end, they find their "Home Sweet Home."

Process

The idea of home can mean a lot of things to different people, and that is what I want to explore. As a woman in my early 20’s, I have already gone though several big life transitions from leaving my family to pursue my undergraduate degree and again when I graduated and decided I want to pursue a masters degree.

Now that I am on the brink of graduating again and I am a little bit older, I am feeling like I’m ready to settle down somewhere and find my forever home, but I don’t know where that is going to be yet. A lot of young people struggle with this transitional period in their life because there is a world of opportunities out there and a million different paths to take and that can be very overwhelming. 

Story boards

First, I started out with storyboards to really nail down the story progression and the rough composition before getting into and visualization.

Mood boards

Once I had the story nailed down, I moved on to making some mood boards to get a feel of the visual direction I wanted to go for. I knew that I wanted to have characters in a lot of different environments, so I separated my inspiration by making a mood board for the background designs and one for the character designs.

Design

Next, I moved on to making some rough character designs for the main characters so I could know what I wanted them to look like and get an idea of some costume designs. I wanted the piece to feel like a journey that took place over a long period of time, so I wanted the girl to have many different looks to signal each scene is on a different day.

Style Frames

Next, I moved on to designing all the style frames. I wanted each environment to feel different, but still feel like it all was in the same "world." In the same way, the characters change throughout their journey, but they are still the same in the beginning and end.

Animation

After designing, all that was left was to animate and composite everything together.

Most of the animation was done in After Effects, with some accents and character animation done frame by frame in Photoshop. 

After the characters and environments were brought to life, the last step was to composite everything together in After Effects and add music.

The Giving Tree Title Sequence

For this Project, I was tasked with making a title sequence for an imagined movie adaptation of a children’s book of choice.

The book I chose was “The Giving Tree,” an illustrated short story that documents the relationship between a tree and a boy and how that relationship changes as the boy gets older and transitions to different phases of his life.

The main themes of the book are humans’ interaction with nature, unconditional love, generosity, & sacrifice, so that is what I focused on portraying through this title sequence

Process

I started out with a mood board to get a feel for the visual direction/color palette I wanted to go for.

I took inspiration from the simplistic illustration style in the original book as well as the limited red/green color palette. Since I wanted this piece to be for a reimagined, more adult version of the children's book, I decided to expand the color palette slightly and make the illustration style more sophisticated, while still being simple and stripped down.

Storyboards

Design

For design, I started out by laying out rough colors so I could make those decisions on the color palette and color hierarchy before moving on to the final style frames 

Style Frames

Here are the final style frames. I wanted to focus on the contrast between humanity and nature with the black and white color palette for the human and the vibrant greens and reds and blues for the natural aspects.

Animation

The last step for this project was the animation. Almost all of the animation was done frame by frame in Photoshop. I used reference videos that I took of my hands to help with the hand animations. 

The more smooth animations like the leaves swaying are all done in After Effects using puppet pin tool. I also added turbulent displacement to a lot of the non cel animated elements to match the feeling of being frame by frame. I composited everything, added the music, and the type in After Effects.

Pictoplasma 23 Titles

The brief of this project was to create a set of style frames for a title sequence or introduction video for an event or conference of our choice.

I chose to design this set of style frames for the 2023 Pictoplasma conference in Berlin, Germany.

Pictoplasma is the worlds leading platform for contemporary character art & design and their yearly conference/festival gathers artists, designers, and animators from around the world with a shared interest in character art.

Inspired by the playful energy of Pictoplasma and the set of featured artists that were speaking at the event, I decided on bright, textured, gradients along with funky text for the base of the piece.

Because the focus of the piece is to announce the speakers of the event, I thought it would be best to introduce them by featuring a bit of their work to showcase who they are and what they do.

All the final style frames together.

MTV Idents

The brief of this project was to select a television network and create two sets of style frames for a Network ID.

I chose the network MTV and created two directions inspired by the channel and their long history of fun, colorful, and creative branding created by a wide variety of artists.

Direction 01

The first set of style frames was inspired by MTV's recent partnership with RuPaul's Drag Race, so the ident would feature the show that is now airing on MTV. 

The initial thumbnail storyboards for this direction & the color palette

4- up of the final style frames.

Direction 02

The second set of style frames is inspired by Valentine's Day as sort of a seasonal ident.

The initial thumbnail storyboards for this direction & the color palette

4- up of the final style frames.

Trevor Project PSA

This project was created for a kinetic typography class and the brief was to create a public service announcement for a non-profit organization of our choice. 

I decided to make a video for The Trevor Project, which is an organization whose mission is to serve LGBTQ+ youth and specifically helping prevent suicide amongst LGBTQ+ youth, which is extremely prevalent. 

With everything going on in the past few years regarding anti-LGBTQ legislation and just general hatred towards the queer community, I felt it was very important to to help shine a light on these issues, which is what I aimed to do with this project. 

CoMotion 2024 Title Sequence

CoMotion is a student run motion design conference held at SCAD every year. This year I had the opportunity to be on the branding team with around 40 other students and it was an incredible and educational experience. I was on the design team so I created style frames for the title sequence as well as designed and animated promotional content for the conference's Instagram.

The concept for this year's branding is titled "The Nature System." The title sequence was broken down into chapters and the chapter that I worked on was the Sacred Geometry chapter, so my frames are inspired by the traditional sacred geometry shapes and symbols, but with a twist. Since I was using mostly simple geometric shapes and lines, I wanted to focus on creating depth and texture to add more complexity toy my frames.

To see the full project, check out the co-director, Kyle Switzer's entry.

4-up of my final style frames.

That's all!

Thanks for taking the time to look at my work, I hope you enjoyed! This is a culmination of my hard work from my time at SCAD completing my Master's degree. It is incredibly gratifying to see my growth as a motion designer over the past year and a half and I can't wait to see where I go from here!

To check out more of my work here's my website