Illusion of Life: Week 11

Experiment 3.3: A Continuation of the malleable comic panel

For this week's experiment, I decided to continue iterating week 8’s animation. It has a solid base of treating the comic panel as a character instead of just a background, and I wanted to play with that idea more. It led me to refine the character motion more, smoothing the blocked animation out, and adding in simple facial expressions for the bird character.

The essential idea of this animation is that the bird character is jumping in and out of comic panels, thinking that he is free of whatever story manipulation. However, he does not know that the comic panels he’s playing with and himself included all belong to a bigger comic panel. In the end, the bigger panel gets bored and decided to “eat” the bird character, subsequently sending it back to its original state. And, the loop begins again.

To treat the comic panel as a character, I added some animation to it so that it doesn’t stay still all the time. Whenever the bird jumps in it, it bounces a little. You could say that the comic panel has its own temper and shows it in subtle ways. Besides the bouncing panel, another comic element, storyline, ties into the animation as white lines. When the bigger panel gets bored, that’s what it uses to “eat” the bird character as I mentioned above.

Although the layout of the comic panel belongs to the 20th-century comic, the colour palette I chose for this animation is rather bold and colourful. It is chosen to have a bigger comparison with the ending where the bird character is being manipulated again. Also, instead of placing hatching dots all over the birds, I decided to try out something different. I like the result as the way only half of the bird’s body is covered in hatching dots is quite pleasing to look at.

When the bird is captured by the storyline and at the end of the swinging, I changed the animation to just a few still frames. That’s an imitation of a photo shutter. And I think it exaggerates the moment more. Different postures for the still frames will be explored in the future for better results. I will also be refining the animation facial expressions and the shapes of the comic panel a bit further so that it could be a portfolio piece.

Link: https://youtu.be/ucy245apwf4