For Animals, People, and Those in Between, I worked with Ozge and Anderson to create a world where our characters might coexist. The Dictator Bee, Sunbear, and Ole came to this project with very strong, developed characters, so figuring out the ways in which they would interact provided a few challenges. Here’s a comic strip we created to tell their story:

We developed a fairly complex narrative to explain why Ole wouldn’t eat Sunbear (Ole is still suffering from the last time he ate someone with a cell phone, so Sunbear calls hime everyday to remind the owl not to eat him) and to describe the relationship between Sunbear and The Dictator Bee (he succumbs to his bear nature every afternoon and steals her honey, she badgers him into paying her and uses the money to fund her world domination schemes). Because the relationships between the animals were based in discreet interactions, we chose to show a single timeline with each animal moving through his or her individual day.

I was really pleased with the format we chose, but I would definitely make a few improvements. First, I’d spread the owl frames out and change the buildings in the background. Secondly, I’d like to frame the whole page with a title and maybe a brief summary of the story. I’m imagining the day-in-the-life image as a first page in a comic book, with our taxonomy facing:

My favorite part of working on this project was developing Ole’s facial expressions. Because he is a giant, stoic owl who hardly speaks and is trying to get to sleep for the day, I wanted him to maintain the same position throughout the strip. This meant I needed to rely on small changes of posture, ear position, and eye shape to convey his transformation from contentedly settling in for his nap, to being irritated by The Dictator Bee’s buzzing in his ear, to drifting back to sleep, to feeling exhausted and sick at being awoken by the cell phone in his belly. The most difficult expression to capture was the first one: sleepy/contented. I wound up basing his face in this frame on Dumbo’s expression during his bath.