2012年5月5日星期六

2012年4月13日星期五

entrances in the virtual world

Once the black dot arrived at the virtual world, it is faced with hundreds of front gates. Losing all his memories, the dot (man) is forced to find an exit by trying the entrances one by one. My first design of the front gates scene was difficult to animate unless I used 3D techniques (just as the following picture shows)  


Then I tried to use abstract symbols.


Test animation of the entrances:

2012年4月12日星期四

vista outside the window

Following the collapsing scene of the metropolitan, there is scene showing the whole city was caught up in big fire. I created this scene to transfer from the overview of the city to the talking characters indoors.
the test animation is too long for this transition and I will put more fire effect on the final one in order to make it
look more intense.
test animation:

2012年4月5日星期四

scene design (the collapse of the world)



the first draft of the scene, created only with AI, then I realize the effect is not so satisfied in After Effects.



So I decided to redo the scene designs, made it more detailed and more realistic.


2012年4月3日星期二

tunnel

I designed tunnel as the connection between the virtual world and the realistic world. At first, I chose to use the CC Star Burst effect in After Effects to show the brains moving to another world, but it looked really boring, so I redesigned the look of the tunnel and made the patterns of the doors consistent with the virtual world.

In this test video, I intended to show the man lost all his memory and transformed into a black dot before going into the virtual world. After showing to my friends and my tutor, I realized there are too much information for the audience to understand within such a short time, and the words are not attractive, I have to rethink the way to complete this scene transition.

tunnel test 1


this is another test, since I still want the star field look, so I created a background for the moving doors. but it looked strange when the doors are moving forward while the colourful lines are unchanged. I have to think other way to make it better.


2012年4月2日星期一

character design


     I want to combine realistic paintings as well as abstract patterns in the portrait.
     I think it is very fun to mix the sketches with orange marker and pencil lines.
  

   I also designed the fabric on the woman.


   Finally, I made video and then exporedt it as a JPEG sequence. Then I used Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter 
   to draw a series of portraits.
  


I created 142 pieces of paintings and imported them as a png sequence in After Effects.



2012年3月31日星期六

abstract pattern

The virtual world in my animation will be made up by abstract lines and dots. I drew reference to the works by Louise Bourgeois, then I design patterns which can be animated.


                                 I used Corel Painter to create small samples of abstract pattern.
                                 The brushes I utilized are Variable Chisel Tip Marker and real
                                 2B pencil.

Initial sketches:




A short experimental test showing how abstract pattern could move.

2012年3月29日星期四

scene design

Inspired by the art works by Paul Noble and Louis Bourgeois, I intend to create abstract and dreamlike scene for my animation "The Choice". I used Corel Painter and Adobe Illustrator to draw the final image.





                                  draft on my sketchbook



2012年2月21日星期二

First Inspiration for my animation

 My new project is going to create an animation, showing my humble thinking of the parallel world and human's solitude. There is an interesting and creative theory put forward by Richard Feynman, it is suggested that at the very beginning of the big bang, there is only one electron in the entire universe. Right, the boundless space and the countless substance are different modes of the same electron in different space and time. Since the big bang, the electron traveled forward along the timeline until the cosmic doomsday, then, it turned back and becomes positron, going in the opposite direction of the timeline until it get back to the beginning of the world. This electron, as the only thing in the entire universe, appears in each point of the timeline, appears in every corner of the world. Although it is the origin of everything, it suffers the ultimate lonesome.

       To our human beings, we can never know whether it will feel alone and boring, but what we can image is that it has a routine to exit, move and decompose; it is constrained in one universe. However, very possibly, in other universe, existing other lonely electrons which never realize their situation and never have the wildest imagination that there exist their potential friends. If the original electron one day decide to get out of its timeless routine, everything in the presenting world will no longer exist, but the electron or everything it decompose, will find so-called the ultimate truth that is beyond our reason and sensibility.
      Followed the great hypothesis, I realize the Parallel World Theory is also interesting. Of course, I am not going to focus on the complicated Physical or Mathematics theory, what I try to think about is something related to space. I am fascinated about the boundary between the space we take granted for and the space beyond human beings' perception. People has the potential to sense something invisible and have feelings that can not be explained by the science.  In other words, we are not really sure the space in which we walk and live is the only space in the world. It is very possible that some space are existing outside our sensibilities, existing in the dark corners of our reason. There are plenty of films show the same concern. For instance, ‘The Fall’ (directed by Trasem Singh), ‘Source Code’(directed by Duncan Jones), ‘Dark City’(directed by Alex Proyas), ‘The Matrix’ (Directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski), ‘Paprika’(directed by Satoshi Kon), ‘Cube’(directed by Vincenzo Natali) and so on.


Research for my new animation "The Choice" (Scene design & character design)

    Character Design:
    In successful animation making, character design plays indispensable role. I used to draw my own story and to create the main character by referring to photos, and I am quite happy with the realistic painting approach and the details which I could capture in my paintings. However, illustrations created in traditional way could be a step stone sometimes, since they leave limited room for viewers to rebuild their value beauty and the hard for illustrators to break through their own boundaries.
Realizing that I should keep trying and doing visual experiments, I begin to rethink of my character design in my previous work, and I understand it is necessary to create something new. Firstly, I began to draw reference from some good example and I found out that attractive and special character could be collage (mixture of faces and other things), could be abstract and distort portrait, could be incomplete portrait (for example, works from Deepa Vekaria), and could be something stimulate the viewers imagination, to be more concrete, viewers could only understand the characters feelings, emotions and ideological activities through the body language, the surroundings, the atmosphere and the colour. The works from Young Soo Kim and Jonathan Bartlett are able to encourage the imagination of the viewers.

               Deepa Vekaria: "I did it for you."

                 Jonathan Bartlett:"Absurdist Logic"
                 http://www.seejbdraw.com/page2.html  


Scene Design:
When it comes to atmosphere construction, scene design plays the decisive role. In my earlier illustrations, I have already drawn from different angels and perspectives, which is similar to the viewfinder in film making. In order to further the practice in scene design, I began to look for some good examples. Since the scene in my latest mission relates to space, the designs I collect all show the illustrators thinking of Spatial composition.
Garrett Pruters works show his concern about the hidden space which is invisible, architecture is crucial element in his work. In his illustrations, the buildings are drawn in two different styles, abstract and realistic. The abstract patterns of buildings are created to depict the strange look of the hidden space, and the abstract buildings represent the real world which we experience every day.

              Garrett Pruter: one of the "Asylum" series