Studio 2 - Insight on Project Concept "Edacious"

EDACIOUS

Project intention & concept

I want to explore how to deliver emotions through the act of eating. This has been my intention from the beginning of the semester, and it would always be the core of my current project. During the course 6 weeks, I have developed more specific sub-intentions that support my current project, which includes: the play with colours and emotional state; subtle emotions; emotions symbolised with the character’s surroundings; exploring ways to present emotions through surreal sequences.

“Why does it have to be her eating?”

I found that eating is a vulnerable act. Eating is an essential part of a human’s life. People have their own eating habit, their most comfortable way of holding a spoon, or their favourite way to eat a meal. I found this act of eating to be one of the most vulnerable moments in one’s life, especially when hunger is the drive to it.

In my animation, I didn’t specify the character’s situation. We simply just saw her walked in. We don’t know her state of hunger. It could be assumed that she’s not hungry, as when the food is presented in front of her, she didn’t react to it at all. On the other hand, after one or two spoonsful of food, she started to eat like crazy, as if she just realized she hasn’t eaten for days. The more she eats the more expressions she shows. We don’t know what she saw on her screen, what we know is that she’s unable to word it out. Instead, the food in front of her became a medium for her to ventilate her emotions, eating instead of talking.

The surreal visualisation that happens in the peak of her eating is a way to portray her emotions through the food’s flavour. By using 2D animation, it creates a free space to manipulate how the scene could be effectively delivered. What I’ve noticed from the related live action works regarding this emotional eating sequence, is that it lacks the exaggeration in expressions. It’s too real. It’s a very powerful scene when delivered correctly, but it’s too constrained by reality. Through my animation, I hope to be able to exaggerate the expressions more, and to free them off this reality’s limitations.

Most of my animation inspiration are works by Japanese director Satoshi Kon, which always find a way to incorporate dreams (the surreal / the unconscious realm / imagination) with his animation’s reality. It’s almost as if he always challenges us, the viewers, to pinpoint which part of his animation are reality and which of them are only symbolic representations. Which is real and which is not? Maybe in my animation, it’s obvious that most of the surrealistic scenes happened in the character’s head. But I do want to erase that line where the reality end and where the surreal begins. Sometimes, there are no lines between your emotions and your reality, and that’s exactly what I want to portray through my work.