Confessions of a researchaholic

Pillar of Shame, which I frequently walked by during my HKU days, has recently been demolished (CNN, BBC, Reuters).
The vulnerability of the physical sculpture as well as the coincidence of its removal with the Christmas day inspired me to draw a motion graphics that is digital (and thus harder to demolish) and hybrid (heads and bodies as Christmas tree ornaments).

https://youtu.be/g0tmhHQus_s

The original story of the little match girl is sad, so here is a happier variation.

On a freezing New Year’s Eve a happy young girl, warm and well clothed, tries to sell cookies in the street. Afraid to go home because her father is pre-diabetic and will eat all the cookies that still remain at the end of the day, she huddles in the alley between two houses and eats cookies, one by one, to keep herself occupied.

In the sweetness of the cookies she sees a series of comforting visions: the warm iron stove, the lovely roast goose, the great glorious Christmas tree. Each vision disappears as a cookie was eaten. In the horizon she sees a shooting ambulance, which her late grandmother had told her means someone is on their way to hospital for heart attack. In munching the next cookie she sees her grandmother, the only person that also made cookies with her. To keep the vision of her grandmother alive as long as possible, the girl consumes the entire pack of cookies.

When the cookies are gone the girl is full to the throat, and she takes Uber to carry her home. The next morning, the father finds the girl sleeping on her bed with a smile on her face, and expresses joy. He does not know about the wonderful visions she had seen, or how happy she is with all the cookies in her belly.

The mood of this motion graphics was inspired by this even though I decided not add the sound track in the end.

I have seen a few cases that when the weather was cold in San Francisco, street folks stationed their bodies on top of manhole covers for warmth.

This motion drawing is inspired by a girl holding a bundle of balloons at the end of the circus show that I saw the day before.
The animation export gave me a little bit of unexpected trouble due to very high spatial resolution (4K+) caused by importing an earlier vector drawing from Ai.