Even in the depths of despair, the world can be a warm place if you try your best to live life to the fullest.
Those are the words 22-year-old Jeong Eun-sook has lived her life by. She s busy drawing animation frames in her dormitory for her graduation project from Chungkang College of Cultural Industries in Icheon, Gyeonggi.
As a junior in the department of animation, Jeong has to create a 10-minute project; hers is titled The Outing.
But it s difficult for her to grasp the crayons because she can only use three fingers the index and middle fingers and thumb of her left hand. And even they don t have the strength to grasp the crayon properly.
But for Jeong, these three fingers are the most precious parts of her body.
Jeong injured her neck in a car accident when she was 9 years old. The accident paralyzed her below the shoulders except for those three fingers.
Jeong s roommate has to help her get out of bed and into her wheelchair every morning. When she needs to eat or go to the bathroom, she relies on others help.
I have no choice but to get help from a lot of people and I am very thankful. I can only manage the movement of the wheelchair with my fingers by using a control stick, Jeong said.
Sitting on her desk were two finished drawings from her film.
The Outing is about an unmarried mother who has not left the house since her 6-year-old only son was born. Her son suffers from infantile paralysis, so she has to take care of him all the time.
One day, the mother finally decides to go out to meet her friends. She dresses up nice and puts on high-heeled shoes. But by accident, she slips and falls to the ground.
All of a sudden, she grows worried about her son, whom she has left alone at home. She turns back, buying strawberries, her son s favorite, on the way. At home, the mother finds her son crying, looking for her. The mother bursts into tears and embraces her son.
In spite of the sad story, Jeong s pictures are brightly colored, mostly in yellow, light green, orange and light purple.
I feel happy when I draw pictures with bright colors, said Jeong as she tried over and over to grab a crayon that kept slipping out of her fingers.
Jeong s parents got divorced after the accident, and she was sent to a day-care center. Life there was uncomfortable, Jeong says.
She moved to Chungkang College of Cultural Industries in Gwangju, Gyeonggi, when she was 12 years old and lived there from elementary to high school.
When Jeong was in her second year of middle school, she became fascinated with comic books, reading Japanese romance manga in particular.
That was when she began to draw.
Even though it was difficult for her to finish the outlines of characters and objects and to fill in detail due to her disability, Jeong practiced hard to develop her own unique style.
The more she drew, the more she wanted to learn about drawing. She dreamed of going to college to develop her talent.
That dream came true in 2007 when Chungkang admitted her.
Lee Myung-hak, a professor of education in classical Chinese at Sungkyunkwan University who has been providing volunteer services at the Sam Yook Rehabilitation Center for years, decided to give Jeong his financial support. He explained Jeong s situation to his colleagues and encouraged them to do the same.
Of course, college life did not go as smoothly as it could have. Jeong faced a lot of hardships on campus, as her chair s wheels often got stuck in doorways, and there was no one to help when she needed to go to the restroom during class. Pens kept slipping from her hand onto the floor.
For full animation, 18 to 24 pictures have to be shown each second.
That means up to 14,000 different images can be required in order to complete a 10-minute film.
Jeong said that it only takes one or two minutes for her classmates to finish drawing one picture, but it takes 10 times longer for her. Most days she s in her room drawing until 11 p.m.
I don t know how time flies by when I concentrate on drawing. I feel much affection toward the main character in my graduation project because I wanted to create a character who is not disabled like me and can move all parts of her body freely, she said.
That she hardly ever leaves her home and misses the outside world resembles my current situation.
Jeong added that although the character gave up on meeting her friends and came back home to see her son, the mother will get a chance to go out with her son someday.
She imagines a bright future for her characters.
By Kim Jeen-kyung
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Jeong Eun-sook uses the three fingers she can move to draw the characters in her animated film, titled The Outing, her graduation project. By Kim Sang-seon
