Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546404
FALL 2026 27 Jo and Raissa's memories are collected in a friendship bracelet, upon which dangle charms that are integral to the plot. To create this, Visual Development Artist Christine Bian says she was directed to focus on the charms' relationship to the girls' personalities and interests. With the Manang charm that would be featured in the growing up montage, the process included gathering specific references and doing sketches of different ideas. "Was [it] a toy from a vending machine that Jo cut in half? Did Jo make it from Fimo clay because she is an artist? Did [Raissa's grandma] Lola help crochet it? A huge part of the design process is asking the right questions," says Bian. From here an idea would be selected—in this case the crocheted con- cept—and a more final color version was then put in a lineup with the other charms, with decisions made about which charm should go next to which to make sure they "played together nicely, in size, in color, and in shape," Bian says. That said, each charm required its own attention to detail. The jeepney key, for example, went through numerous iterations with the final version being rusty and scratched to help support the narrative that it was old and had been in use for a long time. "The very ordinariness of the objects is, I think, what makes the charm bracelet more true to life," says Bian. "We didn't want it to feel overly curated or store-bought. We wanted it to feel real—and all these little details help the design tell the story." C H A R M E D C H A R M E D L I V E S L I V E S