Environmental Storytelling:3 Scenes

Sketches of environments during a few times out of the college.The first scene is in Leeds University where I found it's a urban scene compare to the other ones. The internal scene is in Costa Coffee which would be a great example of interacting with characters, as it is a social environment. The other external scene is the Leeds Art Gallery in the town centre, it remains the elder architecture style than the other scenes.

Environmental Storytelling:The Last Door

The last door is a video game that is presented in an pixel animation way, it is successful on various aspects, and the environmental storytelling especially stands out. Although it is in a pixel style, the environments are drawn in a delicate standard. The style is not only limited to this dark tone but some lighter ones and black&white as well.

Environmental Storytelling:Paprika

Paprika is an animation produced by Satoshi Kon, it is a abstract animation with a clear story line. One of the aspects I love about this film is the environments of it. For example in the top screen shot, it is an urban city style background, but with tons of random other elements, which makes the scene a collides between the objects and the environment. This is also demonstrate in the bottom shots. It was done in a realistic style, but it collaborate well with the characters and other elements within the animation, and the environment itself has narrative as well. 

Environmental Storytelling:External&Internal

I chose a few scenes which include both internal and external scenes, which I found has contrast between themselves, such as ancient and urban, wide and narrow.

Set, Series, Sequence:Narrative

The first idea came to my mind was a spinning wheel falls off from the bike and rolls away itself. But I found it less interesting and it could be too short for 6-12 panels of frames in the storyboard, therefore came up with another idea of a character riding a old fashioned bike, and he falls on the ground because the bike was stuck on a piece of rock on the ground.

Set, Series, Sequence:Storyboard

The story board of the short narrative produced based on the set drawings.

Set, Series, Sequence:Production

One of the series of 12 images.

I used dots in this drawing to draw both the lines and the shadows. I think it is an very interesting texture of producing drawings, and I can imagine produce animation with the style would create lots of inspiration. Below is a image that's done in similar way, with more delicate shadows.

Set, Series, Sequence:Colours

With these two series of drawing, I used coloured markers. The left one I used the three contrasting colours in order to make it capture attention and to stands out from the white background. As for the other one I used only one colour instead of mixing colours, as I think it gives a cleaner outcome and contrast with the background as well.

I am not extremely sensitive at colours, and I need to try out more collaboration with colours in my drawings.

Set, Series, Sequence:Materials

Certain parts of this piece of paper were cut out, which are the gaps between the wires of a wheel. I used to do some paper crafting, and this simple way of cutting parts out of the paper  still work well with a dark background or a contrasting background depending on the colour of the paper. I think this way of producing pieces can be applied with 2D stop-motions, especially for the background.

Character Modelling

During the wood work shop induction, I made this wooden model from the character I designed for the previous study task. I decided to use loose parts of her body because it is easier to be posed due to the structure of my character.The shapes of each of the part of the body was cut out first, and sanded individually. Sand papers were applied to create the uneven parts on her body such as the hair and the texture on her dress.

Set, Series, Sequence:Set to Series

During the production of the set of 24 drawings, I found this my favourite drawing and decided to produce the series of 12 drawings based on this one. Considering the similarity and difference, I think I could produce the drawings with different media, colours and shapes.

The other side:The Animation

The outcome of the animation the other side.

Set, Series, Sequence:Characters

The engagement of characters to objects came to my mind during the production,it is another way of presenting the object, or the word, which is "wheel". In the first one I only included the low part of the character's body, as it is enough for the drawing or otherwise it might occupy too much space rather than pointing the wheel out. In the second one, I decided that a little girl could make an interesting interaction within the wheel itself, and it can keep the whole drawing within a circle as well.

Animator vs. Animation

Animator vs. Animation is the series of animations about characters' engagement with the softwares on computer within the computer screen. The animator has been doing the series for a long time and this is the original version. During my research in order to link with the animation that I'm doing, this piece of animation came up to my mind. Both of mine and his characters are involved with the computer screen, and the software in the computer from a third person's view outside the screen. I found it helps me a lot with the inspiration of how to play with the character and the elements that can be appeared on the screen, while his animation is about the software that creates the character, which is flash, and mine is about a game.

The other side:Story development

During the development of the story, I added more details such as the reason why the character went into the screen, which is that the character's cat went into the screen and he went to chase it, that leads him into the other side of the screen. The question is what would happen in the computer in order to make their journey to the other side more interesting rather than just the character chasing his cat.

During the discussion, I made my mind on the cat has jumped into a game accidentally, and turned the character into the main character of the game who has to fight the dragon, while the cat itself is trapped by the dragon and the character went to rescue it.

Set, Series, Sequence:Similarity

Similarities and differences in the set of drawings were always considered. In these three drawings I produced, they are all wheels of cars, but with different colours, quantities, textures, which I tried to show by using different media: marker pens for the left two and pencil for the right one; use different colours and draw the shadows with different methods.

You Spin Me Right Round:Animation

The animation of the turning around of the captain character, it is in 12fps and she has been spin around for four times.

Traditional animation

Traditional animation during 20 centuries are mostly done on paper and then filmed or photographed, and since 21 centuries digitalised animation became more and more commonly used as backgrounds and frames can be scanned in straightly or done on the computer directly. I like both of the methods as traditional animation creates a unique effect while the digital animation cannot, and on the other hand digital animation is much more efficient than traditional animation.

In my animation "the other side", for the reality world part, I tried the combination of both by making simple backgrounds on paper, photographed then in, and used other digital tools to animate on the background again.

Set, Series, Sequence:Wheel

The word I picked is "wheel", after a few scribbles of ideas I began to make some drawings to response to this word. Wheel can represents many things, and it does not need to be in its normal position, therefore makes the object more interesting.

The other side:Development

I started to make the final animation with these scenes, by using backgrounds drawn on paper and the character drawn in Photoshop and rendered the frames with timeline. I would use a different background for the world inside the computer screen which I am considering is a old styled computer screen.

The other side:Development

I made a few experiments on animation paper at first, considering the style of the outside world, I think using animation paper is a good choice to contrast with digital animation. The image here is the first scene of the animation, where the cat stood on the table and stares at the computer.

Cat soup

Cat soup is one of my favourite japanese animation with two cats as the main character, it is about their adventure of searching of a flower. The style of the animation is in between the traditional and  the contemporary style, but it create a great effect of fitting with the bizarre story it tells. My animation also contains a cat character, what's the difference is that the cats in the cat soup are personalised and walks in two feet, while my character remains the nature of a cat. The concept of the animation inspired me with the idea of traveling between different worlds, and it links to the theme, the other side, as well.

Old computer games

Old PC games such as Super Mario brothers always have a unique quality that indicates the old computer style. It can be easily tell that it's digitalised than other styles, which is exactly what I need in the animation that I'm currently working on, due to the content of the character travels through the reality world and the digitalised world. I wanted to make a contrast between the two worlds, and I found that using these kind of old games' style is a great way of indicating the world which the charter is in currently.

The other side:Storyboarding

I roughly planned the animation with the storyboard and had about 20 scenes, and each of them lasts more or less than 1 seconds. The two parts in two worlds each last for about half of the animation.

Simon's cat

Simon's cat is a series of short animations with a cat being the main character. I think it demonstrates that how cat moves, or how to animate a cat's movement in a simple style of drawing, therefore it helps me to understand my character and it's movement as I have got a cat character as well.

I've picked the one which is one of my favourite among the series, and it contains lots of movement and engagement with environment of the character, which is what I need to try to improve. Compare to my style of drawing, the simon's cat has more detailed face expression, that can help a lot with the understanding of  the animation.

The other side:Character

I did a few concept drawing during the generation of ideas, for consideration of the character, due to the time management, I decided to use a simpler character rather than the first attempts. Therefore I had the final outcome of the following:

Minor alter might be applied when I came to the stage of making the final animation.

The other side:Initial ideas

When I was first generating ideas for this brief, I came up to several different ideas in the form of words, such as life and death, reality and dream, maze and parallel worlds. I summed then up and get to the two final ideas, which are life and death, internet and reality. 

Life and death 

Character is dead, then seen the other world, and came back to life and discovered that it was his dream.

Internet and reality

The world in the screen is the other side of the real world, which is the 2 dimensional world verses the 3 dimensional world. The cyber world becoming more and more like reality, and people are starting to get lost in the other side.

You Spin Me Right Round

In this study task I need to animate the character to turn around for four times, and each round is 12 drawings, which each of the drawing turns 20 degrees compare to the previous drawing. I used blue pencil to roughly scribbled out the height and the shape of the character on each of the 12 papers, and did the character in solid HB pencil, therefore the dragon frame wouldn't capture the blue lines and just the character itself.

Captain Character:Angle Views and T-pose

For the preparation of making the turning around of the character, I started to draw the character by turning her around about 30 degrees at a time. Through this method, I developed several different angle of the character, and I think it is essential if I would use this character in one of my animation.

This is the T-pose of my character, I decided to make her standing in this way with her arm not fully stretched to show the laziness in her personality.

Bouncing ball

This is the bouncing ball practice for the preparation of the brief. I used key frame in this piece of practice, I key framed the ball when it hit the the ground and jumps to the highest point, and then fill the gaps with balls with consideration of timing and spacing.