This project called for a short ‘animatic’ based on a pre-written story. There were three stories available to select from, and I chose an ancient Chinese parable called “The Grateful Ghost.” We were to reinterpret the story as a one-minute animated narrative visual sequence. I liked the parable, so the resulting piece came about with some level of relative ease. The story itself is about three paragraphs long, concise, but the one-minute timeline was only enough to capture a mood and communicate the essentials of the story. I whittled down and reimagined the details of the story, and was remained was a brief glimpse of a mystical life in a mystical but familiar time and place, a night in the life of a figure that heals what we leave unresolved. I wanted to intrigue the viewer but allow room for their own impressions. Prior to this semester, I spent some time over Christmas break experimenting with marbling using spraypaint. At the time, there was no intended purpose or project for the medium, but it produced some lovely and wild surface patterns. I scanned about two dozen papers I’d dipped in varying colors and set them aside (Fig. 3). As I developed the storyboard for my animatic, it occured to me that the marbled papers could be effective in communicating the mysterious otherworldliness I was hoping to achieve. I sketched out the essential shapes of each frame and then treated the papers like a digital collage, layering them on top of each other using Photoshop and animating the sequence using AfterEffects, which I had never engaged with previously. This was my first experience creating an animated graphic narrative piece.