Sitelen soweli
sitelen soweli is a two-minute animated film in toki pona. It features 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.
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 Drawpile session with my friends from kulupijaso.
After that came a storyboard, with a voiceover from me (akesi wakon).
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.
I didn't like how it looked... So I started over.
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:
for i in *.png; do magick "$i" -interpolate nearest-neighbor -interpolative-resize 400% "${i%.*}.png"; done
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
I have created a quiz to help use the film as learning material.