Sweettooth

Spring 2021

Sweettooth is a visual dialogue between two people compiled into a stop-motion animation. In this academic assignment, two students were required to communicate using only 8 x 8-inch squares of any design, and no other communication. Sweettooth is the result of two students creating a narration in their dialogue.

I was assigned to virtually communicate with a classmate on 8x8 inch squares over the course of three weeks. These squares were purely visual and could have little to no writing within them. My partner, Sui Aioki and I, were not allowed to have any other form of communication or clarification about the designed work that was sent or recieved. After three weeks, we were told to compile our “conversation” into one body of work. 

Tools: Adobe Photoshop & Premier


During the three weeks, I quickly found myself confused with how to push forward the conversation. We started out with playful illustration and collage and after Sui had sent her second image back to me, I pivoted our direction into a storyline. The storyline is nonsensical and child-like and goes as such: Once upon a time there was a llama and bunny that had differences in opinions about their favorite candy so they started underground illegal brainwashing political campaigns to win over the popular opinion about which candy is best. At the end of the story, the world turns into a post-apocalyptic state of having no control over their actions and are ruled over by two political parties that have similar ulterior motives. Here this the dialogue:

Once the three weeks were over, we brainstormed ideas to compile a storyline written in this manner. My concept was to show our story through the early 2000’s popular toy, Viewmaster. This is because our story only worked well when read chronologically. It was also a familiar product that was intuitive in its design. We decided to move ahead with this concept and design the exterior portion of the viewmaster. However, due to the pandemic, we needed a digital compilation as well in order to present our dialogue to our zoom classroom. So to emulate the experience of the viewmaster, we made an animation of the squares running through a viewmaster.

An unnamed character in the story is a blue fuzzy monster teamed up with the bunny. We decided he would be the forefront to the design of the viewmaster because of his texture. Our product is designed to reflect the monster to provide a textural feature along with the entire experience of interacting with the story. Our viewmaster is now renamed Viewmonster.