Master Of Animation, Games & Interactivity
Master Of Animation, Games & Interactivity

Theme

Play and Time

Method

In this creation, I used frame-by-frame animation to complete it.

In the animation, an egg changes from bird to butterfly, from butterfly to cocoon, and finally from cocoon to egg. I want to use this process to express people's life, old age, sickness and death.

Context

This week, I kept thinking about what time is. Time makes people grow old and new life is born. In Buddhist doctrine, human beings are in a cycle from birth to death. Humans are in a constant cycle of life and death.

With the acceleration of people's social rhythm, life seems to be accelerated. Many people live a monotonous life of going to work, going to get off work, eating and sleeping. This kind of life seems to be robbed of the opportunity to remember and think by the tight time, and it repeats every day.

Like Wies Vander Wal (2017) said, 'Our memory is our main tool to detect loops. It is what makes us realize that something already happened before. Without our memory we are not able to perceive the sequence of events and therefore can unconsciously get caught in a loop. Eternal repetition is a punishment.'

Many animals spend their entire lives hunting, mating, and producing offspring. They don't have the complexities and thinking of the human world. Chickens in factories live to lay eggs. Many insects live even just for breeding. Moths work hard to cocoon and die alone after laying eggs. They live for the cycle of life. When we die, we also become a handful of dirt, or a drop of water.

So I wanted to use the cycle of life as this week's theme. I assume people live simple lives like some animals. I think about some topics related to the life cycle:

  1. lWhich came first, the egg or the chicken?
  2. lThe life of a caterpillar turning a cocoon into a butterfly
  3. lWater is the source of life
  4. lBirds are the fragile descendants of ancient, ferocious dinosaurs that kept evolving

Reflection

In this week's creation, I still made a few attempts, but undoubtedly failed. At first I was a little lost with the expression of time, and I wanted to use the theme of simply getting up and lying down again and again. But I found that as my thinking time increased, I was not satisfied with overly simple expressions, I hoped to incorporate some morphing elements (Metamorphosis). This was a relatively simple but fun attempt for me.

Link to final video:

https://youtu.be/8tJPm1itZ20

About This Work

By Lu Zhang Luna
Email Lu Zhang Luna
Published On: 03/08/2022

tags:

APD, Advanced Play Design