This is my first animated sequence of Surai. I made it two years ago, in 2007, during the second 2-week intensive course we, the EUPMT students, did every June in Glyndŵr University when it was still called NEWI. That year we had been working on animation in groups and since mine had finished our short film 3 days before leaving I decided to do a little animation on my own. I want to thank Susana for helping me colouring the final drawings while I started capturing the frames. (Muchas gracias, Sue-chan! :-)
Besides, those weeks I started getting used to Macs and I did the frames capture with iStopMotion (was it??) and edited the final animation with Final Cut.
The following text explains the plot of the short story I'm going to create for the Negotiated Studies module. It's centred on the origins of Surai and how she finds out about them.
Her story takes place in a world that resembles our medieval age. All her life she has wandered without a clear aim, earnig her living by trickery and deceit or carrying out temporary jobs when she had no alternative.
She doesn't remember where she was born or who her parents were, so when she hears about a mysterious lady with a gift for fortune-telling she hurries to go meet her.
Evening. Surai enters a tent, stuck in a narrow street of a village. The interior is lightened by an oil lamp. An old woman dressed in rags sits at a small table.
- So – she asks once Surai has taken a seat in front of her, - what do you wanna know about your future?
- Nothing. I need to know about my past.
The old woman stares at her for a moment.
- People with no past… arise suspicion around here…
Surai remains silent.
- You sure you want me to find out?
- Go ahead.
- I’ll need something personal. Something that has belonged to you since before you remember.
Surai opens the sack she carries on her back and pulls out a piece of cloth wrapping something large. She unwraps it, revealing a sword, which she lays on the table.
The elderly woman puts her hands on it and looks into Surai’s eyes.
********
“A shaman from a town called Ney carries out a magic ceremony… He’s in front of a tree, a big one… He’s done this before. He knows he shouldn’t be doing it again. The former shamans did it just once in their lives… But the situation is desperate; many villagers are dying from a mysterious illness he can’t cure… He’ll turn the old sassafras into a human being, whose blood will have the healing properties they need… He places… (the woman’s voice trembles for a second, since it’s the same sword she’s touching now) this sword at the foot of the tree and starts murmuring. The tree seems to come to life and its appearance starts changing. But something goes wrong and the shaman loses his control on the enchantment. A violent shaking pushes him back. The tree finishes its transformation and a human figure stands on the spot it once occupied. (It’s Surai.)
She opens her eyes. The shaman hurries to try to catch the laying sword but she moves quicker. She grabs it and stabs the shaman with it. Then she runs away, followed by the shaman’s dying voice as he puts a curse on her. – Damn you, evil from nature! By the auras of my ancestors, you shall be affected by our people’s disease and shall share their same fate! Once the last one of them has died…you’ll die next.”
********
Surai opens her eyes with a gasp and a shocked expression. She hastily abandons the tent, unaware of the old woman’s last words:
- Unless… you find a way to recover your original appearance.
Some years ago, eight or nine, I think, I sat at the drawing table I shared with my sister, ready to do a poster that I would give as a present to my eldest cousin and his wife-to-be. I think I wanted it to be a wedding present. Anyway, I faced the DIN-A3 sheet and started creating a female character. On the left side her face appeared. Green eyes, chestnut hair, worn in bunches, slightly dark skin. On the right, a full body image, revealing her yellow dress, waist-tighten by a metal belt, a cloak, a pair of boots… She also wore some accessories: long hanging earrings, hair slides and a chain-hanging brooch on her forehead. Later on I realized that the mixture looked excessively ornate and coloured, so I simplified the character design in her next drawings.
So I had finished the poster and that was it. Or so I believed.
Some time after that, I started studying Spanish literature at school and we read a classic, Lazarillo de Tormes, by an anonymous author. The book tells the life of a boy during the 16th century and how he learns to survive in a society led by hypocrisy, selfishness and a false sense of honour by turning into a cynical and joining his contemporaries’ lifestyle. He’s a cunning person who takes care of himself above everything else. And I liked that. A non-idealistic character for a far-from-perfection world. A glimpse of the personality I wanted my recently created figure to have.
Besides, at that time I had watched several anime series and I felt a little upset about the average female characters personality. I’m not referring to all of them, of course; there are many interesting female characters in anime, like Faye Valentine in Cowboy Bebop, Hitomi Kanzaki, of Escaflowne, or Anshi Himemiya from Shōjo Kakumei Utena. But many of the productions one could see on TV (most of them shōjo, like Card Captor Sakura, Sailor Moon, Fushigi Yuugi…) displayed young females being sometimes exasperatingly sensitive, talkative, extrovert or cry-babies, while others just showed them as lustful women or sexily dressed just for the fun of it (generally shōnen: Saber Marionette, Ranma ½, Dirty Pair…).
I wanted to make her different from these types of gals, so she became a girl of few words, independent, discreet, and adopted a slyness similar to Lazaro’s.
She hadn't been given a name yet, so that was the following step. I looked up in the dictionary how to translate "pillo" or "pícaro", as Lázaro was often called, into English. Several nice-sounding terms turned up: crafty, cunning devil, slyboots... I was studying Japanese at that time and I had learnt the hiragana and katakana syllabaries and what rōmaji was (the transcription of Japanese words into the western alphabet), so I took "slyboots" and turned it into “suraibutsu”, which I think Japanese people would pronounce like /srai-buts/, dropping the final “u” and muffling the first one. Her name was to be Surai, and I left Butsu as an option for her surname.
There’s a mix I’ve made with some of the many drawings of Surai I’ve done until now.
The one on the top-left is the poster drawing, without colour. Not that I am a great draftswoman now, but it’s obvious that I was pretty worse then.
The following is an example of the original design and colouring, which I later changed. Down on the right side there’s one of my latest drawings of her, as it is the one on the opposite side of the page. The rest of the images are other costumes designs and attempts to draw her as a child.
And in the middle there’s the
hiragana form of her name. Being a transcription from English, it should be written in
katakana, but
hiragana tends to look smoother so I left it this way.
