Penny's grounded!! So her parents are making her run errands as punishment. Her friend Nickel runs a checkout lane though, which means he gets to hear ALLLL about it...
Will Nickel keep up with Penny's crazy story? ..... will YOU be able to??
"What's a Coin Tea???"
Coin Tea is a passion project I've been working on for years now!
(I think like half a decade now wow...)
If you're familiar with slice-of-life anime like Nichijou or Azumanga Daioh, then you're already a step closer to being familiar with Coin Tea! I really appreciate those down-to-earth yet wacky "everyday life" shows, so this is kind of my own take at it!!
"Short Exchange" was an opportunity to take Coin Tea a step further towards that dream. It was exciting to have a chance to take these characters and make something a little more "official" out of them! After completing this project, I definitely can say I'd love to make more Coin Tea shorts in the future! There's still so much to do with them!
Currently I'm aiming to create a central/main comic series for it: Coin Tea for 99 Cents! Things like "Short Exchange" are like bonus media for the series surrounding that soon-to-be comic series! But for now, It's kind of like a pilot! A random episode that gives you bits and pieces of that juicy worldbuilding I've been cooking up!
I do hope you all look forward to seeing more of them in the future!!
This is Penny, Nickel, Dime and Yen respectively, by the way!!
I included two animatics because my first pass of the short was VERY different from the final product. The first animatic was kind of mixed in reception, so a lot of fine tuning and feedback was taken into account!!
The second animatic had a shift towards making Nickel's confusion the core for the audience to latch onto, and leaning more into just making Penny's story completely impossible to keep up with!
This "episode" of Coin Tea featured Penny Nickel and Yen. At first it was just gonna be Penny and Nickel, but Yen was added in as a minor character to help give Nickel some kind of agency against Penny's chaos.
Dime is normally the voice of reason that keeps Penny in check.. but I felt like having Penny go full force would have been the best way to debut her character (that.. and animating 4 whole characters for a senior project would have been hellish in a semester..)
I plan to make a turnaround of Dime whenever I get around to starting another Coin Tea short! Until then, I'm really happy with how these three turned out!
It was also scary yet exciting to find voice actors for my characters!! Working With Mei and Dandy to make my characters come to life was a process I couldn't even begin to express joy for. It was so amazing to have their rising talent be lent to my project!
From Scraps to Screen!! These are some notebook drawings I did in my notebook before full-on production began. It's crazy to me see some of the earliest gags I've ever doodled become fully realized..
My work was done in Clip Studio Paint, I handled most of the production myself (roughs to lines to background and coloring), but there were a few times where friends of mine had to help out with the production!
This mainly came in coloring some shots for me after the lines were done, which allowed me to move onto animating the next shot in queue while they did the colors. Some friends even helped with some VFX and movement effects.. I can't thank them enough for their contributions!!
One friend even made a soundtrack for the short, you can check out an extended version of it down below!
As a bonus, here are some weekly production doodles I made during the course of the short! Dime was in charge of keeping the other 3 in check, kind of like as if this was an in-universe short of their own!
And lastly my poster!!
