Au-nimation: The Story of My Autistic Journey
By: Joe Gendron ’26
Advising Faculty: Nadav Assor
Project/Mission Statement:
“Au-nimation: The Story of My Autistic Journey” is an 8 minute animated short that documents my lifelong struggle with autism. The word Au-nimation is a combination of the words autism and animation. This short was entirely hand drawn by me on Adobe Animate, and edited together on Premiere Pro. This project gave me the opportunity to grow as an animator by experimenting with movie clips, parenting objects, applying tweening, fiddling with layer depth, and experimenting with the camera to make the project look as if it was a film. Almost all of the characters are voiced by me because I wanted to highlight my talents as a voice actor. I wanted people to understand what I went through with my autism so I created these brain particles to express how sometimes I slack off and think differently , and I also wanted to increase the sounds that irritated me to make the audience understand why I get annoyed by those sounds. This short includes traits of my autism that I still struggle with today, such as trouble with eye contact, talking to myself, and fidgeting my body whenever I get excited or when I think about media that I enjoy.
Related Fields: Ammerman Center