16/11/2020
This year I started my first animation programme(not only for school as my undergraduate courses) about making a sting selected from one of eight International Competition Programmes for London International Animation Festival(LIAF) with classmates and tutors in the ual. After a long time of idea development and decision made by the LIAF programme group, my animation about ‘Playing with Emotion’ programme was finally chosen as a three-member teamwork for the following holiday and the next term’s first month. Personally, I felt glad to take this job and worked impressively with my partners. It was also my first time to be a director working with Simin and Charlies in an animation production.
This animation, named as ‘Artist’, describes an emotional human-to-animals transformation travel of a female artist in a canvas’ world. It starts with a female artist getting angry during her paining process and then she morphs into a red bull, experiencing a falling-down until she turns into a sad raven in a raining environment, and followed with a satisfied and joyful peacock which transmutes itself into this female artist with a completed artwork in the end.
- Designs
I chose three animals—bull, raven and peacock and used distinctive and rich colours to represent different mood feelings: red as anger, blue as sadness and bright yellow as joy. And the main character was designed from an idea of a puppet-like nose and round eyes, from which I wanted to show an emotional change to a live human look(see below).
But the design works then became a first significant challenge for me. Without any experience of leading a teamwork, I found it was hard for me to take actions immediately before making the in-betweens and animating. I spent a long time on searching for a better and impressive style during a whole summer. And I also forgot to make a precise scheme to guide the whole making process. So all the things came together at one time, which pushed me into a highly stressful condition, even though I made it before the deadline.
My job covered the main characters and the studio’s backgrounds, following my tutor Steve’s idea of making the beginning frames monochromatic to a colourful end(see below), and Simin completed the animals’ travel backgrounds based on my recommendation and references from some pure colourful oil paintings I searched in Pinterest.
And the flower in the peacock part was designed from the inspiration of Flower of Life image, based on same overlapping circles(see below).
- Animating and Colouring
The animating part was separated into three parts. Based on the animatic, I did the in-betweens about the beginning and end parts and also the peacock movement, and Simin did the raven part from the fire to the raining part. Charlies did the movement of bull as well. The movement was crucial for me so that I took most of time to complete. And due to the lockdown impact, I could not use the TV paint in the studio, so I drew most of my keyframes and in-betweens on my iPad(see below). The new software I chose was Procreate which I found has a similar function as Photoshop. But the issue of this software is that I could not set a timeline about animating. In that case, I decided to think of timing very carefully.
- Editing and Music
Because of the date limited by the deadline, we only had a few time of editing. I used Premiere to unify the most shots I had made and added my partners’ shot to check the timing and pace of the whole animation. Then Simin completed the final editing, including the music and sound effect. However, due to the remote work, I could not guide the whole editing with Simin, so I reviewed the last version she made for me and made some small changes before submitting the completed version. And I even added the LIAF ending format through tutor’s require.
This making experience gave me a lot more than I think, including the time issues I could have avoided, and the way that how to separate distributions for animators and unify the pace and shots of the animation. This is also a good chance of practicing how animation products in industries from ideas to a final film. Although I have seen my flaws of ability on organisation, but the highly communication with groups was very useful and helpful for the process. I will thank all the members and tutors who joined in this LIAF Programme.