A draft animation of one of ghost stories in my One Hundred Ghost Stories book installation (Studio One project). Further developed from my previous animation test using Rubberhose and Puppet Pin.
As a recap, this is the story about Okiku:
"The samurai Aoyama Tessan accuses his housemaid Okiku of breaking one plate from a valuable set of ten. Aoyama is enraged when Okiku maintains her innocence, murders her and disposes of her body in a well. Thereafter, night after night, Okiku’s voice is heard from the depths of the well, mournfully counting from one to nine, after which she lets out a chilling cry." (reference)
After having done my animation test in Week 4, Kate gave me some feedback on how to improve on the animation, such as: adding a mask in front of the well, so it looks like the ghost is emerging from it; making the hair flow better; have the hair push in then out when the ghost emerges; include more pauses in the animation; and fix the neck when it comes forward. I was also able to put the skills I learnt whilst developing the animation of the ghost in the lantern here too, such as using the Wave Warp effect for the hair (originally used to create fire in the Oiwa animation), and also the looping expression to make the hair loop continuously.
I had a lot of trouble getting the wave warp of the hair animation to stay pinned to the head (for the side profile), and spent half a day trying to get it to stick. It turns out it might have been because I had duplicated and replaced the hair composition rather than inserting it as a new layer every time.
Through the development of this animation, I also learnt some new skills in After Effects, such as:
- How to create a Set Matte effect for the well
- How to get the Set Matte working for layers (the collapse transofrmation switch had to be turned on)
- How to get rid of the weird border from the Puppet Pin tool
- Using the graph editor to exaggerate motion (need to play around with this a bit more)
- Editing the animation path using the pen tool
I also got really stuck on how to get the plates neck to look right as suggested by Kate (bigger -> smaller -> bigger when the head moves forward). Both the Puppet Pin and Rubberhose tools didn't allow for translations in 3D space (the Z plane). I tried bending it using the 3D Geometry options and the Cylinder CC effect, but both didn't give me the effect I wanted. In the end, I faked it by using the Bezier Warp effect to manually bend the plates. Kate also gave me some more suggestions on how to tweak the animation in my consultation session this week, which I'll try and incorporate in my next iteration.
Temp music score credits: Brother & Sister from the Hereditary soundtrack by Colin Stetson
About This Work
By Helen Kwok
Email Helen Kwok
Published On: 29/04/2019