The Enchanted Garden

For our latest project we had to read Italo Calvino's Difficult Loves and choose a short story from the book. I chose to do the Enchanted Garden because it reminded me so much of my old childhood film I used to watch The Secret Garden (1993). Hopefully I can create the garden in the magical sense that I envision it to be as described in the story.

Here are some development work:

My friend Jordan Louie showed me a garden we had right on campus that I didn't even know about. I took more photos for reference so I plan to do more studies like these.

Update

Over the winter break I had the opportunity to work on the Cinequest Film Festival directed by David Chai. I was on the visual development team, and together my team members Priscilla Wong, Wilbur Liang, and Kimberly Knoll created the animation backgrounds for the short commercial. It was a lot of fun working in a group and learning from each other. Thanks to Priscilla leading the group, this project helped me tremendously about how to stylize/add character into everyday environments.

Here are some the backgrounds I did:

Storyboard by Michael Fong

Final background

In this last scene, the characters were animated by Aden Scott.

Here is our final trailer: