Delayed

„Delayed“ is a 2D animation, that deals with the simultaneity of things. Focusing on the topic of repetetive train rides to work or school, it explores and reflects how we feel inside. Personally, Iʻve always felt exhausted, stressed and annoyed when I spent a lot of time taking trains back and forth. But I realised that thereʻs always something worth taking this journey for: the destination.

Iʻve started my work on this project by sketching the landscapes on my train rides to university and back. I noticed that I began sketching very quickly and mostly from memory, since the picture I saw outside of the window vanished almost immediately. Many sketches were done in seconds, some took a maximum of 2-3 Minutes. But it was clear that, if I were to use these sketches as a base for my animation, the brushwork had to be fast and chaotic.

I took this specific style, which also captured my emotions concerning this topic very well, as a reference for the rest of my animation. I began taking photos, videos and audios of my train rides to collect further data and finally decided to use the technique of rotoscopy.

Then I traced a 15-second clip from a video that I took frame by frame in the same sketching style and made it into a loop to use it as the main visual in my animation.

In the post-producton I decided on the audios Iʻd like to use, which consisted of people talking, train announcements, train sounds of movement and more. I wanted to create a realistic soundscape that makes it feel like youʻre actually sitting in a train.

As you can see in the stills, the image gets more and more disturbed and chaotic until itʻs no longer recognizable. I used multiple effects, like chromatic abberation, and edited the animation in after effects to establish the feeling of everything morphing together, distress and exhaustion that I often felt when taking frequent train rides.

After all, the screen blacks out and the only thing you hear is a sigh of relief and the train doors finally opening, which marks the arrival at the destination and the end of the ordeal.