Link to original gift.
Link to Project 01.
My original gift was an illustrated story, titled “SO HAPPY,” and it’s a story about a vampire that takes place in late 19th century Louisiana. This piece came together after a night of endless doomscrolling (the world is on fire, there isn’t much else to do). I came across a new take on The Turtles’ “Happy Together,” originally a bright, happy-go-lucky pop-rock song from the late 1960s. This version was haunting though—very villain-like. The original poster, Keilan Lockett, sang it in such a sinister way that a visual story immediately popped into my head.
At the time, I didn’t know animation, so I pieced together 20+ still illustrations together to tell the complete story: vampire longs for girl, vampire stalks girl, vampire turns girl. For project 01, I wanted to build upon this and make it feel more cinematic through animation. My original gift was time-based, so I wanted to challenge myself and keep that spirit alive for this project.
In order to bring the story to life through animation, I first had to figure out which software to use. I watched YouTube videos and read countless articles on which ones work best in 2026, but because I originally made the illustrations in Procreate, it only felt right to do the animation in Procreate Dreams. I watched a few tutorials on YouTube before I felt comfortable diving in, and surprisingly, it wasn’t as hard as I thought. The interface was easy to navigate, and importing my drawings from Procreate into Procreate Dreams made the process that much more efficient. After manipulating the necessary layers and specifying what should take place for various keyframes, I was off to the races. Additional tools used for this project include iMovie and Adobe Illustrator.
The end result of my exploration is a scene from what I think “SO HAPPY” would look like as a movie. It incorporates title cards, audio and animated sequences to really sell the darkness of our vampire subject. I wanted to play on whole silent film angle, and I used “Nosferatu (1922)” as a key inspiration. Not every illustration from the original "SO HAPPY" project made it in, but Project 01 still reads as part of that same story.
If I had more time, I would explore how to pan more so even the backgrounds of certain images came alive more, and I would animate the entire story from beginning to end. That would take many more hours, but this exploration did teach me a valuable lesson: it’s ok to be bad at new things; the more you do the thing, the better you become at it. I look forward to diving more into 2D animation and bringing stories to life through this new medium.
Learning References:
Content References:
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Directed by F. W. Murnau, Prana Film, 1922
Nosferatu. Directed by Robert Eggers, Universal Pictures, 2024
Vampire In Brooklyn. Directed by Wes Craven, Paramount Pictures, 1995
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