I created this project for cementing my exchange experience in Australia.

 

The main philosophy of this project is to be the best version of yourself: a turtle can be slow on land, but in the sea, an environment that fit him most, he can be really fast.

 

Toto encountered a cute jellyfish in the virtual sea, and then based on his observations of jellyfish structure, he invented a jellyfish-like robot to fast his speed. He used his imaginary and creativity to solve the real world problem.

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After writing the first draft, I felt there was missing some ingenious correlation among the plots. Consequently, I took the biography of the protagonist, Toto (a turtle), as the entry point. His diverse attributes (such as its amphibious ability, lovely nerdiness and occasional smartness) were classified and listed as such key words as beach, ocean, a science student, mechanical discovery ...Then, based on these words and my own experience, I finally came up with some interesting and dramatic plots. I am smitten with such derivative process of script writing that resembles that of math problem solution. After finishing the script, I worked on the storyboard, which was a process that made me experience the feeling described by my lecturer Rebecca, “Animation actually is a kind of performance.” It was as if I was living the life of someone else. No matter what I did and where I went, I was imagining the shooting of each scene and standing in the shoes of the protagonist to observe things. Moreover, to design a better lab building, I interviewed a student from mechanical engineering and added a ventilating duct as well as bigger windows, doors and smoke and flame alarm device to the design. And to enhance the nerdy atmosphere of the ambient visual system concept, I browsed Zhihu, a website similar to QUORA, and looked for the questions that science students would pay attention to (for instance, the questions like what's the most beautiful physics formula?) and endeavored my best to act and think in the protagonist's way.