IOL_week06_S2_2022

Week 6 Breaking Assumptions

Context: This week's theme was Either, Nicolas gave us two options to do this week's exercise and I chose the first way. When seeking advice from Moon, she mentioned that the two shots in my story that indicated that traffic was starting to flow were too simple, so I experimented with these two shots and updated and replaced them in this week's IOL. Nicolas said that at least one of our attempts needed to be a break from the original idea, so I went along with that to think and update my work.

This week's experimental clip：https://youtu.be/c5PT_1_Q4wc

Reflective text:

Version1-In my story, the question of how to communicate to the audience that traffic is starting to clear was a problem that bothered me. In the second version of the story, I simply used shots like the red light turning green, which was two small shots I had forced on the audience to connect to the plot when I didn't have any ideas. I made the first version of the animation for this.

Version2- However, after the actual effect appeared, I felt that it was a bit too stilted and didn't match the flow of my previous animation and the vivid effect I wanted, so I wanted to make some different small changes to the effect of this change in the traffic light to make the whole animation look more natural in its movement pattern and not so rigid and very different from the way the front and back shots move. So I made some changes to the shape changes of the red and green lights. The changes made the shots more vivid, but this version is still too montage-like and a bit more abrupt than the previous episode.

Version3 - After thinking about breaking my original idea, I thought it would be better to just extract the colors of the lights and leave out the shapes, which helped me to break the stereotypes. Because of the red and green colors and my original traffic theme, it was easy for the audience to associate it with the traffic lights, which is an accumulation of people's life experiences and inertia. So in the third version, I chose to combine the main character in the play with the theme of melting, and then the association with melting led to the association with water, and I thought about water-related kettles, basins, and taps. In the end, I chose the tap because I liked the effect of the cross-shaped tap turning, so I dropped the girl design on the tap and twisted the tap, and the big green water representing the green light rushed down, washing away the crowded cars on the road, and then the traffic flowed smoothly. This version is one of the more satisfying ones for me, as a stand-alone clip he is great, but in the context of the whole film, there is something that doesn't fit.

Version4- In the final version, I was thinking in this way, because in Studio 2 my inquiry was about how to use abstract animation to express the emotions of the characters, and during the expression of the emotions, none of the main characters were in the frame, so the sudden appearance of the main characters in this segment would not connect with the previous abstract animation segments. Abstract animation is an element of my animation that cannot be avoided; it is an important form of expression. So I combined the character bursting scene with the red light scene, which made the shot seem less abrupt and relatively natural in its connection.

Related work

Abstract animation， Jonathan Reser(2017)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXgoNXOGwaQ

This is a video with a high number of likes on Youtube, which also uses many organs of the human body to abstractly express depressing songs. This film has a different structure from mine, as my project consists of two parts, the real world, and abstract animation. In my understanding, abstract animation is more about using symbols or geometric shapes other than people to express concrete feelings, represent objects that cannot be seen or touched in reality, and express moods. This is also the film that had some influence on me when I revised the last version, and after analyzing the proportions of the elements in the film, I was decisive in removing the proportions of the characters in the abstract animation. Because many of the main characters take part in what is more of a character scenario animation, in my first abstract animation project, I thought I should avoid such confusion. In this piece, many times he just extracted the iconic features of some classic scenes or elements, rather than obsessing over retaining its overall look, for example, the skull only retaining the teeth, but the audience still knows it is the skull. I will also keep this discovery in mind afterward and apply this little trick to my work.