studio2_week2_working process

At the moment I am starting with a rough animatic attempt around the dream world for the sake of my theme of freedom. As this is my first time doing animatic and systematically planning my work for studio2 in detail. So I have spent this week exploring and making my first attempts at expressions and shots, narratives etc. As you can see everything is very rusty and unprofessional. But for more experimentation I used wiki promises to brainstorm the following short story.

The inspiration came from finding games with novel themes on game recommendation platforms, Last day of june, Carto and Moncage, which gave me an inspiration.

Emotions and experiences can bring different feelings and everyday make a lot of decisions but your choices make the path of the heart change, which changes the character, and the character changes the destiny. So I was wondering how I could give myself a second chance and go back to that point to choose again and whether the future would be different.

Freud's psychoanalytic approach has led countless people to accept that dreams are a projection of reality. Therefore people deal with thinking and methods of analysing the causes and revelations of dreams in reality, i.e.: trying to use dreams as metaphors for the mind.

Available elements:

the ability to go back several times to find the truth of something (third party - God's perspective, objective)

Being there, travelling through the past and the future (foreseeing the future, going back in time, subjective, living in an alien world from which nothing begins, changing things, changing the fate of characters, saving someone you care about)

Dreams come true (daydreaming, daring to imagine elements within, combining the absurd with the rational, things you wouldn't dare to think about and things you never thought possible)

Nightmare Haunted (a tale of uncertainty, a temple escape, thrills, danger, excitement and tension like the ancient poem by Zhuang Zhou, which translates as: The past is unreal like Zhuang Zhou's dream at dawn, when he wakes up he is confused.

I don't know whether I become a butterfly or a butterfly becomes me, but my feelings are the same as Wangdi's, and I put my yearning and sorrow in the cuckoo's sad song: Zhuang Zhou dreamed of a butterfly at dawn, Wangdi's spring heart is in the cuckoo's voice. (In your dreams you have your successes, your failures, the people you miss, the things you have fought for and tried to hold on to, your beginnings, your arrogance, your resistance.

(Dedicated only to those who are lost in reality, who are not willing to settle for the status quo, who are bold, who are able to experience the joy, sorrow, anger, separation and inquisitiveness of all beings.

The initial idea

 If I just wanted to show the gap between make-believe and reality, I should have spent a lot of time on the impact, so I envisioned many kinds of plots. Learning the animated narrative from Susan, at first I could use one sentence to sum up the whole story. I envisioned many kinds: for example：

A dream is a spirit that dives into a person's dreams to help them discover a badly handled and regrettable event (which may have had enough impact to change the person's life), but with the help of the spirit she has a new confidence or a change of attitude and feels that every day is a good one.

The boy suffers from social phobia and is afraid to speak in front of people because of the psychological shadows of his early childhood, which he confronts again in his dream and is treated differently, leading to his healing, cheerfulness and courage to express his opinion.

So I tried to roughly write a storyboard based on my initial idea to see how feasible it would be.

The lovers are broken up by the monk because of religious issues, the monk abets the woman to eat more of their token of affection (some kind of food that can increase fat) in order to avoid getting back together, and the woman is weak after her high blood sugar and later discovers that working out can strengthen her body and years later beats the monk to get back together.

The policeman works hard, he often experiences the minutiae of other people's lives, and also puts himself in the shoes of others who have experienced it first hand to analyse the motives for the case. Over time he loses himself, carrying the emotions of the crowd at the expense of his own life, the hypnotist tries to erase his excessive memories, but the policeman ends up keeping all of them, hoping that this empathy will make life easier in the future.

Li Bai, a talented poet, went to serve his country and was taken in by the emperor for his spontaneity However, due to his spontaneity he failed to deal with the workplace and finally resigned from his position and lived in seclusion, after which he got drunk every day hoping to stop seeing things sober.

The king uses a magic mirror to simulate the art of war before each expedition, but once the mirror fails, he is able to overcome the fear of not having the mirror and having to face the enemy alone with his own ability, and he finally wins with confidence.

The photographer has a magical camera that can make the bad things perfect and he gets lost in this beauty. He becomes more and more inseparable from this camera leaving his life devoid of friends and family and living in his own world.

Based on these short stories, I can summarize them as follows. There are many settings like this that I have researched but I have dismissed them all. For the same reason as the penguin animation I made last term, I didn't think there was any way I could finish this little short in half term at my current level, and more crucially I wanted my edit to be understandable for the viewer to see what I was trying to say. Because I decided to keep things simple, I wanted to highlight just one thing. In conjunction with the requirements of studio2 to make the film more impactful,  I decided to choose social topics that everyone would be attracted to.The aim of the short film is to make the audience think about a current situation that often confuses them in just a few minutes. According to my theme, it should be: the conflict between the cruelty of reality and the beauty of the ideal, such as the moment of waking up from a beautiful dream, the dreamer's internal reminiscence and the struggle to accept reality, and the fact that beautiful dreams can make people lose themselves and make us forget which is the real world. And when you can't tell the difference between the real and the unreal, do you choose to stay in your dream and refuse to wake up, or do you bravely return to reality and accept your fate? I hope my short film will make the audience think about this question and come up with a vague answer. 

So I created a small animated gif of the initial version with the following link.：

 https://youtu.be/nxsc_3QoO2g

After continuous iterations and feedbacks, I think the production direction of studio2 needs to reinterpret a work of art more towards a fresh and creative perspective, as well as to focus on the value and impact of the work. I looked up a lot of astronomy and geography books and tried to make big changes for that. And again, I tried a lot of rough storyboards and checked their feasibility.

1. Moment = eternity, introduction to four dimensions, impact without boundaries. Problem: Difficult to describe the concept and performance.

2. Explore different perspectives to restore a real world. See flowers with the eyes of a flower, birds with the view of a bird, and the sea with the view of the sea. Problem: Exploring their vision and really expressing new senses is difficult.

3. Skull piercing, piercing surgery presented as a walk-through memory of the effects of the piercing. Problems: More clichéd and difficult to attack the darkness of the painting.

4. biological explosion: about 3 billion years ago is the time of the formation of the Earth, that is, the Cambrian period, and among the 1 billion years no one knows what happened, homo sapiens apes appeared only 100,000 years ago, and bacteria early in the time of about Cambrian period, multi-cellular organisms appeared, which is the civilization of bacteria. The consciousness of the brain cell's self originates from the chemical signals released, so it is highly likely that we are simply enslaved by bacteria.

5. Mirror world: three mirrors around, physical needs blindfolded solution and long time will enter the world of the mirror. And the reality of you will be replaced by you in the mirror.

6. If philosophy is just a dead end and a hoax and self-congratulation, only applies to the world there is no way to make an explanation for things. We are like bugs in a tree, the scope and habits of our lives leave us no way to see the landscape further away, to experience life differently, to encounter different things. We only see a part of the world because the mind is limited. How can we see what a whole world looks like from a different perspective? Question: It's a prequel to 2. but as a standalone animation it's hard to not know to make a science fiction film.

7. if we practice at home, doing nothing but drifting and sleeping, drinking only mineral water and white bread. after 2 days we may enter a new world, the reason is that by doing so we can experience the information brought by the various senses, and our five senses will act like tentacles to explore and give feedback to any physical object. It's like discovering a new world that feels new. For example, the feeling of eating an apple. (The juice squirts into the mouth and the fruity aroma plugs into the nose)

I think it is good to combine their elements to form a small animation with a deeper meaning, but it is obvious that each of them has too much information to be narrated in a short story. If they are all information infusion audience will find it difficult to understand, obscure, uninteresting. So I decided to choose the two subjects of biological explosion and the world of mirrors, and blend them a little. This will turn out to be: bacteria born since the Cambrian period have been hiding behind the mirror, have been hiding in our second personality. When our first personality can't handle the problem properly, the second personality comes out to protect itself. And the way to protect itself may be advantageous to the bacteria.

Based on this, I created a second version of a small animated gif, the link to which is：https://youtu.be/WfSgmbMBtfs

In conjunction with some questions about inquiries in class, I thought deeply about the connections.

Statement of intention and pre-production

My current topic is about emotional personality, trying to express that the scene in front of me is not a real scene but something that comes to mind, i.e. desire, and based on this my research can find more material on personality and psychology.

The gap in knowledge I have explored is that most of the studies on mental activity and desire are independent, whereas I think it is important to start from the source, which means that they can be integrated together. Because science is about the controlled variables approach, but the controlled variables approach itself stands for separation and is also inherently contradictory in that it cannot ignore the influence of the whole but wants to separate the individual. Only assembled cells and multicellular organisms send out chemical signals that produce consciousness and the thinking behaviour of the brain.

The solution to the problem: the audience can analyse the way things develop from different ways of thinking and perspectives, and experience the pleasure of thinking about things in a creative way.

Two short links to animations showing my iterations in this process have been given above.

Here are the sketches I made this week, they are all for the real desires of the psyche to find inspiration, and a normal person (which needs to be used to contrast with the world in the mirror)

Over the next week I will be talking to Jadd and Evan and picking out a story direction that fits my theme. So that I can submit the refined Animatic in week 5.

Downloads:

Download File: animatic-dreamland.mp4
Download File: bacteria-mirror.mp4