Pratt BFA Communications Design Thesis

Adam Afzali Illustration

Tales from: Far Far Away

Animation
Character Design
Concept Art
Illustration

Like any senior in college, I had a mid-life crisis. I started to question the work I did. What drives me to create? How can I do what I love and actually get a job? Throughout my Pratt experience I have learned and tried many things. I have picked up a lot of design knowledge. I always thought my illustrative career path would take me down the road of design. However I was wrong. I find myself with no passion while doing jobs relating to design, and I find it hard to do things when there is no passion involved. What gives me passion is drawing, illustrating and just creating in general. But how can this be a job I can enjoy? In the spring semester of my junior year my illustration professor, Floyd Hughes, took us to a presentation by Jonah Lobe, a concept artist. At the time I didn’t know about this career path. Jonah has worked on big projects such as Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. I was a little star struck to say the least. I used to play Skyrim all the time. It was a cool concept to me that I’ve played with his characters before. That’s where it all clicked. My love for video games, animated movies, and cartoon shows can actually be an exciting career that I have a lot of passion for. For my senior thesis I want to start to cater my work towards this field of work. That is where A.a.A Cartoon was born. A.a.A Cartoon is a cartoon studio that produces whimsical characters and worlds alike. This will be a place where I can let all of my character run free. Making characters has always been something I’ve done. As a bee’s natural instinct is to get up and collect pollen, mine is to design characters. It is something I’ve always enjoyed doing, and now I’ve learned that I could build a life with this passion. So, I wanted to make the craft of designing characters the focal point of my last semester of Pratt, so I can be ready to tackle any task with this ability during my time at grad school. There are currently two projects in production at A.a.A Cartoon, Pizza your Heart and Tales from: Far Far Away. Pizza your Heart revolves around food characters of New Yum City and the antics they get themselves into. Tales from: Far Far Away is an anthology series that follows around a young character named Addy and the stories he hears on his adventures. These projects will be rendered on Adobe Photoshop. I am hoping to strengthen my skill set and become more efficient during the course of this project as well. I am a novice to animation, but I would love to animate some characters too, if my time and skill allow me. This is an interesting project for me and I’m excited to see where it goes!

adamafzali.co

instagram.com/adamafzali