A draft animation of one of ghost stories in my One Hundred Ghost Stories book installation (Studio One project).
The story I've chosen here is about Oiwa:
"The main character in ‘The mysterious story of Yotsuya’ is the virtuous Oiwa who is married to Tamiya Iemon, a struggling samurai turned umbrella maker. Iemon falls in love with his young neighbour Oume whose father administers a potion to Oiwa that awfully disfigures her. Iemon is disgusted and wants a divorce, but in despair Oiwa kills herself instead. Later, Iemon marries Oume but is tricked by the ghost of Oiwa into killing his new wife. Iemon rushes away in horror and takes refuge in a temple. In the middle of the night, Oiwa’s horrific, deformed face appears in an old torn temple lantern, as depicted in this scene. Driven to insanity, Iemon takes his own life.." (reference)
After having done my animation test in Week 4, I found creating the assets and animating this ghost story much less daunting. However, as I'm not from an illustration or animation background, I still wasn't 100% happy with the character design and animation. After my consultation with Kate, she gave some really constructive feedback, such as keeping the ghost blurry, making the animation less mechanical, and have the man disintegrate into the lantern at the end.
Through the development of this animation, I also learnt some new skills in After Effects, such as:
- How to create fire using shape layers
- How to loop a composition
- How to time-stretch a layer (so the fire loop isn't all the same)
- How to add the wiggle expression to a null layer so I can keyframe the amount of wiggle using a slider control
- How to change the name of a slider control
- How to fix the 'cached preview' error
- How to reload footage after making updates to Illustrator layers
Temp music score credits: Book Burning from the Hereditary soundtrack by Colin Stetson
About This Work
By Helen Kwok
Email Helen Kwok
Published On: 28/04/2019