IOL_week09_S2_2022

Week 9 Texture, Light and Colour

IOL_week09_S2_2022

Context： This week Nicolas gave me a proposition on Texture, Light and Colour, which I am in the process of colouring for the past two weeks. I had already decided on the tone of the colours in the pre-production stage, a low brightness cozy warm colour, but in practice it takes some time to keep a uniform tone but still make the colours colourful. It took some time. This week I chose two shots to experiment with the colouring aspect. The first shot was the melting of the clock into the teapot and the smoke enveloping the protagonist's face, this shot shows the protagonist's anger at the traffic jam and I chose to show this emotional change through colour. The second shot is the final shot, where the protagonist is relaxed and floating. Finally during the week I also tweaked the background section based on the advice given by Nicolas, I removed the outlined dark grey line outlines to highlight the main characters, this also harmonised the whole clip quite a bit and made everyone's attention less distracted and focused on the main characters.

This week's experimental clip：https://youtu.be/uzKXNdLFmP4

Reflective text:

At first, I only noticed the colouring of this part because the material of smoke is difficult to represent in 2D, the lines can be straightforward to feel the smoke flow. Still, it cannot be a relatively complete animation clip if it is just simple lines without updates to replace them. After studying at IOL, I believe that to make a good animation, every shot needs to be constantly tested, thought about, and updated to sculpt a relatively complete animation sequence, which then constitutes fairly complete work.

In the film, the protagonist is caught deep in a traffic jam, and in such a situation, her emotions are gradually rising. From the beginning, she goes from doubt to anxiety to anxiety and finally anger, which is an incremental change in her feelings, especially the stage from pressure to anger, which belongs to the climax stage of emotional intensification. So at this stage, I needed to focus on increasing the effectiveness of this emotional progression in terms of colour design while keeping the online script intact. I was inspired by IOL's theme this week, so I chose to use colour to show this emotional progression.

Firstly, I chose to start with the colouring of the smoke, as it is an essential element in the climax of the sequence. For the first version, I considered keeping the lines so that the flow of the smoke could be maintained, which was essential in articulating my animation. I then chose to draw these lines in orange, as orange-red is a colour that is mainly used to indicate urgency, and this was in keeping with what I wanted to convey at this stage, as the protagonist goes into a rage after being extremely anxious. However, after the actual effect came out, I found that the lines didn't do the job; they were coloured in and couldn't even do the job of bringing the character's face out of the smoke.

Next, I chose to make a simple colouring approach to the smoke animation. The smoke was coloured in the most usual way, white, and I tried to adjust the transparency, which was a little better than just the orange lines but too flat. In terms of the whole film, the animation was bland and lacked some climax, but it was not realistic to change the subplot and the line work, so I had to design the colours to make this section a climax.

In the end, I changed my mind with a hint from the reference work. Maybe it would be better to change how the smoke is coloured rather than the background colour? With this in mind, I changed the background to an urgent orange. However, the sudden modification of this colour had a cliffhanger dissonance with the previous background, so I thought of making it a natural transition. Secondly, changing the background to red in such a straightforward manner didn't work to aid the emotional progression of the protagonist. So I opted for a transition colour from light to dark.

At the same time, I took Nicolas' suggestion that I could perhaps switch the way the background was coloured to make it different from the style of the main character's car scene. Otherwise, it would not draw the audience's attention to the main character's actions and plot. The Week7 IOL experiment also inspired me, so I removed the lines in the background leaving only the colour blocks so that there was a contrast between the two scenes and a change to the overall focus of the animation.

Related work

Pass, Zi Jin (2018)  4:19-4:58

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1m54y1G7bw?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0

Pass is a short film co-written by Communication University of China Animation students in their junior year. The film tells the story of a girl who always avoids choices due to indecisiveness and misses everything in the improvisation of the train of life. The film is about the truth that sometimes in life, you have to take that step, even if you are not ready for it. In this animation, which has similarities to my work, the focus is more on portraying the psychological activities of the protagonist than on driving the plot, and the clip uses a lot of techniques to describe the anxiety and panic that this girl with choice obsession feels when faced with a choice. Such emotions are appropriate for my piece, which also uses a colour change in the background from 4:19-4:58 to support the character's emotions, from the light colours of the seven colours to the final plunge into darkness.

Black Box, Shuyu Li (2019)  9:18-9:53

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Pt411L7Uo?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0

Black Box is a short film by Shuyu Li of 717 Animation Studio, which poses the hypothesis that if two unrelated people are trapped in the same space, then even if unwillingly, we will have infinite time. The protagonist is often caught in a fantasy about the other person's back. What is she like? What does she want to do? What kind of worldview does she have? And extrapolates many unfounded clues from the usual minutiae of observation ...... After a series of imaginations, the protagonist suddenly realises that the person he is talking to in his head is only his wishful thinking. So, one day when they meet again, the protagonist decides to initiate a conversation with her.

In such a storyline, which is almost always the protagonist's inner activity, the protagonist is in great pain and urgency when he finally breaks free from his feelings of inferiority, and the emotional change of such a nirvana is extreme and intense, chaotic colour background returns to white in the final moment of releasing himself. It also inspired me to see the background colour change from average to gloriously highly saturated colours to all white, keeping with the protagonist's emotional change. But the film also does an excellent job of including things that are stressful around the characters, as gorgeous as Alice falling down the rabbit hole, and I hope I can learn from this in future projects to make the images feel better.

Photo Lie, Tao Xiong (2019)  2:55-3:00 & 3:11-3:14

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1U4411G7oS?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0

Photo Lie is Tao Xiong's undergraduate work, which focuses on a widespread social issue about people's transition to Photoshop to beautify their selfies and the protagonist's struggle with the process of self-entanglement and contradiction between his online self and his authentic self. Like the previous two Related works, it is also more about showing a person's perception of self and portraying that character's emotions during a particular event or reflection. They both use, to varying degrees, changing the background's colour to show the character's increasing or decreasing feelings, which is indeed a shared device and a good option when it is not possible to make a suitable design for the main object.