Vivian Zheng

I wanted to make something for my friend that felt personal instead of just giving them a normal gift. I liked the idea of taking something they already do, which is dance, and turning their movement into animation.

I started by thinking about how to translate movement into individual drawings. The hardest part was making the animation still feel like the original movement while drawing everything frame by frame. I took their original video, downloaded it frame by frame and then drawing out each frame.

I really liked seeing the drawings start to move once they were put together. Small changes between frames made a big difference, and it made me pay more attention to rhythm and movement than I normally would.

This project made me realize that I enjoy using animation as a way to make something personal. Sure it was really tedious as it took me 12 hours, but it also made me more interested in how drawing can capture movement rather than just a still image.

I have a lot of stories that I want to make, and sometimes I wish I could just get everything out of my head and have it planned and refined already. That made me wonder: what if I could do all of the pre-production with just a thought? That was where the idea for the Synapse Cap started.

I started imagining what it would be like to think about a story and have those thoughts become the beginning of a real project. I didn’t want this project to only be for certain people but wanted to be for everyone. From there, I developed the cap as a speculative tool that could take any ideas you can think of and connect them to a computer for you to see for yourself.

I did spend a lot of time thinking about how the cap could work and what would need to be inside it. I used AI to help me refine some of those technical ideas, but the original question came from my own frustration with having more ideas than I can physically plan and make.

The cap obviously isn't something I can actually use right now, but that's what makes the project interesting to me. I like thinking about what would happen if the gap between having an idea and actually making it became almost nonexistent.

My high school's yearbook theme that year was film, so when we started thinking about how to advertise the yearbook, I pitched the idea of making a trailer. A yearbook is basically a collection of a year's worth of stories, so treating it like a movie felt like it made sense.

After the pitch was approved, I spent about six months working on the script and figuring out what would actually make people want to buy the yearbook. I kept coming back to the fact that most students probably didn't realize how much work goes into making one. Instead of just telling people to buy it, I wanted to show them the people behind it.The yearbook staff puts an incredible amount of time into creating it, but it is also our way of showing school spirit and giving something back to our school. I wanted the trailer to communicate that.

Having the actors be people from the yearbook staff made the project much more personal. I'm really grateful that everyone agreed to be part of it. We spent about two months practicing lines and shooting scenes while also working on the actual yearbook.None of us were professional actors, so I had to learn to work with whatever we captured and figure out how to make it work in editing. I was basically doing every role except operating the camera.The editing process took about two weeks, which was all the time I had left. It was brutal. Files wouldn't save, computers kept crashing, and every time I added animation I felt like I was losing my mind. I ended up editing the trailer around five times, but somehow I got it finished and turned in at the last minute.

This was the first project where I got to work with a real cast and crew, and it felt like I was finally getting experience in something I was genuinely passionate about. After the trailer was published, it blew up locally and actually did what I wanted it to do: advertise the yearbook. The yearbook sold out within a week, and getting so much positive feedback during that time honestly felt like a fever dream.