[Studio 1] WIP Week 5-6

Script:

Related Work
Jim Carrey - Unnatrual Act
Facial expression and motion - in this video, Jim Carrey impersonates various facial expressions, which mostly cannot be accomplished normally, he breaks down his facial transitions step by step slowly with facial muscles. Unnatural Act explores multiple aspects of life including religion, marriage and the actor’s own sanity. This, in particular, includes his visual responses to various news to his life, and the audience will perceive differently by their own backgrounds. This work is a raw and detailed demonstration of facial muscle movement compared to cartoon.
https://youtu.be/RbIq-f1_Dr4
https://youtu.be/ofTYAnsiVKI
Weekly Record
Achievements
As for the essential argument, I want to tell the audience that this is a retrospective of the User Interface Design Evolution. So to give the audience a better understanding of the narration, I’ve constructed a motion graphics video. This video introduces how every design looks like, and to make the video more interesting, I tell this story based on my fictional character Dotte. Technically, I’ve created it in After Effects. To construct them correctly in terms of fluency and authenticity, firstly I’ve set the FPS at 12 for all segments, basically it is like a vertical sync for games; then, I’ve entitled motion blur for elements that serve a sense of speed, so that it won’t seem laggy; I’ve also done all of the illustrations on Photoshop, Figma and Illustrator, so I keep visual elements 100% original and customisable, and you can view the iterations based on my project file here.
An frame by frame hand drawn animation is also the interesting part of these two weeks. In week 5, I’ve done my first animation in Harmony. To accomplish a reasonable motion, I illustrated the frame of the beginning, the breakpoints and the end based on the storyboard, then I started to fill in frames tween. There are challenges too, at first, my animation went too fast and the motion was too stiff and robotic because the FPS was set to 23 and I failed to define the motion in every frame. Now I’ve adjusted the FPS to 12 and put a placeholder with keyframe function and onion skin function on, so I can track where the character needs to be positioned accurately.
In week 6, there are more scenes added to the video, and refinement also is underway. As consulted with Uyen, I decided to optimise the emphasis of my storytelling, and the memory point is the facial expression changing. As advised by Kate, bringing “thinking” to the character is also the vital of animating, and I set off to enrich the influence from the environment and responses generated by the character. So I’ve added more interactive scenes showing that the character is a talkshow host who pisses off the audience, and that’s where the drama begins.
I’ve also composed a Intro music in Logic Pro, to make it look more like a talk show in reality. And the rest of the video, I only use mouth and hands to do the dubbing. No referencing, no sampling, just the instrument of flesh. This act has emerged me to not only convey deconstruction and liveliness visually, but is also acoustic capable.
But all in all, the plot is always serving the idea of delivering history of design and bringing life to the storytelling.
Next Steps
Jim Carey’s facial impersonation has give me a detailed guideline of vivid expression and muscle position. Collaborated with 12 principles of Animation video, I can animate the transition of the facial expression.
To prepare for next assignment, I decide to put more focus on frame by frame animation, so I’ve made a plan of practicing drawing in Toon Boom Harmony. And also refinement in AfterEffects.
Overall it is a challenge and I think I’ve made the progress of myself. In this era, I think cross-dimensions work has surfaced and appeared more often, so this demands creators to acquire more knowledge in arts and collaboration skills, and one more certain thing, the capability of discovering art and beauty. And I think I am on the way of this route.

Downloads:

Download File: part6wip6.mp4