Week 7 Metamorphoses and transition
IOL_week07_S2_2022
Context:The first proposition of the week was a bit confusing to me, perhaps because of my poor English, and with Yee's explanation, I managed to understand the first proposition of the week. But in the end, I went for the second exercise, which I roughly interpreted as three different tests on the same shot to make the shot more polished and natural looking. As the direction of my IOL portfolio is to help refine my Studio project, I chose the aspect of color and drawing style testing that is in line with my current progress. My work in general can be divided into two parts, the part that explains the plot and the part that gives an abstract feeling. In my initial character design, the character style was the line and low-saturation colour, but after the Animatic was done, I started to like the idea of a single line for the abstract animation, and to differentiate the plot from the abstract animation, I wanted to try to remove the lines from the characters and keep only the blocks of colour, or use monochrome and lines for the plot and blocks of colour for the abstract animation. I wanted to try to remove the lines from the characters and just keep the colour blocks or to use a monochrome and line style for the plot and a colour block style for the abstract animation. So I did three versions of this to test the style. There was another shot of the heart bursting, in the first version the heart stopped beating after bursting with blood, in the second version I chose to keep the heart beating but changed the rhythm. And finally, I made a reply to Nicolas' response to me in Folio 1, he wanted to be able to learn more about my production process and production software, I have an example of this mentioned in the video. I will be recording a short clip of the production process and insights in each of the later weeks of the production.
This week's experimental clip：https://youtu.be/PBS86R0bf-g
Reflective text:
Style1-Style1 - The first style I considered was that if I made the abstract part in colored blocks, it would make a big difference to the real world and the perception of the world, and the two contrasting styles I could think of at the moment were pure lines and colored blocks. As my animation is fast-paced overall, perhaps a color block style would be good, so I have tried to make the plot part in a pure line style in contrast, but in this one style, I felt it was a bit bland. In the initial character design, I designed the main character in very warm and gentle colours, and in this test, I still didn't want to abandon the original colour scheme.
Style2 - In the second style, I followed the colours of the character design strictly for the animation, the lines and colours were colour-coordinated according to the Palette of the character design, this one style met my expectations, but during the two months of production and testing, my mind shifted a bit, I wanted the style to stand out and be a bit more natural because after finishing the Animatic, I had difficulty finding points where I could continue to improve. So I thought maybe I should change my drawing style because when I was making the Animatic I was doing it to the standard of a line drawing, so maybe I just need to colour it now, but on the abstract animation part, the colouring became a big problem for me, because I like them as a single line art style.
Style3 - In thinking too hard and getting stuck on whether to keep the second style, I opted to just put in the third style and then come to compare their results. In this one, I removed the lines from the main characters, leaving only the blocks of colour, which would satisfy my desire to put the abstract animated parts in lines. They would contrast and allow me to keep the line style abstract animation part. But all these ideas were dashed when I saw the final result. Because the result wasn't as good as I thought it would be, I wanted warm and cozy colours, but maybe the story itself was a rather nonsensical plot and my animation was fast-paced, they didn't fit in with the line-free illustration style. So I may as well go ahead with the second style and implement the animation as originally planned.
Version1 - In the shot of the heart bursting, I've been thinking about what state the heart should be in when it bursts because it can't take the vine. Maybe it would deflate or melt? In the first version I chose the heart to be stagnant because a dead heart stops beating, but the blood that spurts out and splatters on the screen is constantly changing, and there is something strange about the heart behind it not moving, as if it is not finished, so I decided to do a second version.
Version2 - In the second version, I continued to make the heart beat, because the moment it bursts it should not die immediately, but be in a state of injury and near death-, so I wanted to continue to make the heart beat while at the same time having a different rhythm than the previous beating, maybe a little more rapid would be more visually effective, because from the whole clip, after this shot, the back The tempo picks up a bit and goes into the climactic part, so that's why I chose to make the dying heart beat at a fast pace rather than a slow beat.
Related work
The overlooed, The Chemours Company (2018)
This is an excellent hand-drawn MG-style animation, which is very much in line with what I envisioned and expected from this animation's drawing style when I was designing it in the early stages. Here I will just refer to the art style of this animation and let it be used as an example to support my animation style test, which uses low saturation grey lines and low brightness colours for its art style. Low brightness does not mean low saturation, its colour choices are still colourful, but they are not overwhelming, each colour works well together in warm tones and the whole style has a lovely warm feel to it. This animation gave me not so much an inspiration as a good reference to explain my style of art, and I also found in this film some rules for such a style, such as thin, light-coloured lines; well laid out cool or warm tones (in this case warm tones); no high saturation, high brightness colours; having a low saturation, low brightness intermediate colour as a background and universal colour (a light warm orange in this film) and uses this colour extensively to maintain tonal consistency.
I don’t know ,Pinyu.Z, Daining.M, Maner.X(2018)
This is an experimental watercolour animation made by a team of three, the theme focuses on the inner feelings of a difficult choice maker, and there is an attempt to use watercolour to represent the parts of the mind that are confused. This animation is the best example of the contrast I envisaged between the dramatic part and the abstract part, where the little creature buying something is a single line, and the fragment expressing his torn inner feelings is indeed a watercolour block, without the lines outlining it. I think this makes the whole animation divided and makes the expression simpler, letting the viewer know that the single colour block section is not real but an abstract animation of the character's inner emotions, this animation gives me a very strong contrast between the painting styles, but again in the case of the two styles they are still unobtrusive and work together perfectly so that you can understand that these are two different parts of the expression without that the two parts are derailed, they are still distinct and clearly expressed.
By Xiying Yao (Eve)
Email Xiying Yao (Eve)
Published On: 19/09/2022