View source for Sitelen soweli

'''sitelen soweli''' is a two-minute animated film in [https://tokipona.org/ toki pona]. It features [https://sona.pona.la/wiki/sitelen_pona sitelen pona] glyphs as its main characters.

It premiered on YouTube and at a small in-person toki pona event on the 28th of March 2025.

It is a work licensed under the Creative Commons 0 license.

[[File:sitelensowelithumb.png|thumb|Thumbnail/promotional image for the film.]]

== Synopsis ==

Soweli, feeling bad because of its loneliness, sets out to find a friend. Along the way it meets Waso and Kala, but they don't get along well... Eventually, though, Soweli finds Jan. They are perfect for eachother!

== Development ==


The first ideas for the film started brewing in a [https://drawpile.net/ Drawpile] session with my friends from [https://sona.pona.la/wiki/Communities#Telegram kulupijaso].
[[File:Filmtokipona.png|none|thumb|Snapshot of the Drawpile board in question.]]
After that came a storyboard, with a voiceover from me ([[User:Drakonic|akesi wakon]]).
[[File:Tokiponastoryboard.mp4|none|thumb|The storyboard.]]


It was pretty smooth sailing so far. I reached out to jan Kekan San for a voiceover and some linguistic guidance. But things got tricky at the animation stage of the project. I couldn't decide on a visual style for the film...

The original plan was to animate the whole thing in Adobe Animate.
[[File:Sitelen soweli.mp4|none|thumb]]

I didn't like how it looked... So I started over.

[[File:Sitelen soweli2.mp4|none|thumb|Animation test in the new style.]]

I animated in Krita, using a brush with no antialiasing and on a 480x270px canvas. After exporting the frames, I ran this command to resize them:

<code>for i in *.png; do magick "$i" -interpolate nearest-neighbor -interpolative-resize 400% "${i%.*}.png"; done</code>


One more final change: I found that I liked the film better without solid colors, just lines. And that's how the final version came to be!

For some compositing and final editing I used After Effects and Davinci Resolve.

== Additional materials ==
[https://classquiz.de/view/36a49de3-1ab5-4ee6-aae6-aaec902861b9 I have created a quiz to help use the film as learning material.]

== External links ==

=== Streaming/Download ===

* [https://archive.org/details/sitelen-soweli-final sitelen soweli on archive.org]

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWFyg_I2AXY&t=25s sitelen soweli on Youtube]

* [https://dalek.zone/w/hYzHcSHrtVpQiCYaD4Qwtx sitelen soweli on Peertube (via dalek.zone)]