Plot:First idea is about appetite. The story plot is a streamer who makes a profit by eating foods live board cast and eventually destroys himself because he eats too much.
Inspiration:However, such an extreme story setting, it is inspired by the real world. I observed an example, an Internet celebrity due to food broadcast, physical decay and eventually died of stomach cancer.
Idea3 Browsing phone
Plot:The second idea is browsing phones. the story is about a girl who is attraction of many phone. She gets one and browse one. Then, she is captured by the monster hand in the phone, although the monster fails.
Inspiration:This story Inspired by myself, I often forget to do other things because I browse my phone, so I visualize the attractiveness of the phone as the hand of a monster to describe the strength of the phone’s attractiveness.
MA 3D Animation: Yaxin Hou (Cynthia)/Qiaoqing Yu (Jonathan)/Jiazhuo Tang (Tang)
MA 2D Animation: Yinyun Xu (Sophia)/Guowei Gou (Guowei)
Showreel: https://vimeo.com/808156376
https://vimeo.com/808156376
Process Video (my part) : https://youtu.be/-8ej9zVhbkI
Brief introduction of story: The animation Lost Paradise presents the boy Nimo’s experience of seeking friendship in his fantasy amusement park.
Category: A promotional video of game
Inspiration:
The story was inspired by school bullying as it has been a prevalent social problem. Stepping from childhood into adolscence,victims of bullying struggle to develop mechanisms for selfprotection and build defensive mentality to the outside world. Thus, through this animation, we attempt to express a style ofunhealty defensive mentality which desire for building bondswith others but, at the same time, fear and disbelieve in suchrelationships. The presented mentality sometimes also even makes the person destroy the relationships they have built.
About the game (a brief summary as the main focus of the animation project is on the story concetps):
The player picks up the boy’s broken doll at the end of the animationand starts his/her quest in saving the boy. Through interactions with the fantasy amusement park in different episodes, the play triggers stories and learns about the inner world of the boy.
Summary:
Five members completed the collaborative task within ten weeks. The theme of the project is school bullying. Through this video, we aim to map out a kind of self-protection or response to trauma after being bullied in childhood, which is a way to emphasize the consequences of such bullying behavior in childhood.
Generally, the animation’s overall atmosphere and story content matched our expectations, effectively conveying the theme.
However, I am not satisfied in two aspects. More than the original goal of making a promotional video for the game was needed; a promotional video for a created game should also accompany a backstory supporting the video. In addition, the animation could have been improved as it took less than a week to complete. And our ability to express the lens language is insufficient, so the story’s rhythm needs to be better. We didn’t use some classical cinematic lens language and transitioned to make the animation more connected.
I am satisfied with the early story design and model design stages because we spent a lot of time brainstorming the story from different angles, effectively conveying divergent ideas, and resolving conflicts among the team. As for the part of the model design, it went smoothly. I understood the workflow, from two-dimensional design drawing to three-dimensional model building, texturing, rigging, animating, rendering, and compositing. This workflow gave me a clear idea of what needed to be done to build the connections between the different stages, such as script concerning, modeling, animating, rendering, and compositing, which also helped me estimate the volume and time of the following animating work. In the first week, due to our ambitions, we made the mistake of setting the task volume large, but at the time, we needed to realize that our time was tight. We kept reducing the size of the project every week, trying to control it to be completed within ten weeks. But once I have become thoroughly familiar with the workflow, One of the critical things I have learned from this process is about being realistic about what can be achieved quickly.
If I did this project again, I would know more clearly how to allocate my time to different parts. We would arrange a timeline more clearly and assign work more precisely. And in the early stage, I would watch some movies with similar styles, use their lens language as a reference, and conduct a shot preview in advance to ensure that the connection between the shots will be better in the future.
I want to thank Serra, George, and others for their suggestions for our collaborative project and also very grateful to Ian for his valuable comments on my blog. Their advice and guidance were beneficial to us during the mid-stage project when we had a lag in the story design part. I am also very grateful to all my teammates for providing technical help during the production process, which helped me learn much in this collaboration. Debating in collaboration is common. Arguments about creative ideas in the collaborative process can be problematic; however, they are an essential part of this process to produce diverse content stories. The collision of ideas creates a more exciting team project.
After getting feedback from last week, I did the previs5.
previs5：
Feedback：
There are three kinds of problems that occurred previsV this week.
The first one still needs to refine part of the character animation, in order to ensure smooth animation or a good connection with the front and next shots. The dog was lying down in the previous frame, and the next frame should be lying down and then raising his head and body. When the dog turns, I use a more mechanical right-angle turn. I should make the turn smoother. When the male character moves forward, he needs to cross the alley from the left and to the left in more detail, instead of staying still.
details of character animation
The second one is some of the more detailed camera movement. For example, when the camera is moving forward following the dog, it has to wait for the dog to stop moving forward, the camera has a delay effect, and slowly stops the movement of the picture. In part of the shot composition, the integrity of the body must be ensured, so the shot should be moved down.
camera animation/shot
The third one is that needs to be modified is to add more details. For example, when a stray dog lies in a cardboard box and hears the barking of other dogs, this barking sound can be represented by a simple cuboid. Implement a visual representation that simulates a barking dog. This is very interesting. There is a way to realize two-dimensional content through three-dimensional. The second is that at the end of the story, the dog barked, and then the black image shrank to the center, leaving only the dog’s head, and then let the image end. This treatment is also to let the audience notice that under the happy ending, the mental state of the stray dogs is expressed through actions. And it also draws on the style of traditional Disney children’s animation in the early 1980s and 1990s, with a classic story ending.
other visual effects
To sum up, this is a more detailed modification in order to polish the previs better, so next week I will continue to modify my previs based on these contents.
This week, I mainly focused on the part of animating shots.
I am responsible for six shots (7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12), all including in the scene of the toy room :
Shot 7: The boy walks into the room. Camera close-up to the footsteps, following the boy into the room. (shot length: 3 – 5 seconds)
Shot 8: (NEW) Instead of shooting the scenes of people, the layout of the toy room is shot with the camera from left to right and then from right to left, which is to shoot with a similar human perspective. (shot length: 5 seconds)
Shot 9: With the camera still, take a close-up shot of the doll lying in the toy machine. (shot length: 3 seconds)
Shot 10: The boy tilted his head and looked closer at the doll. Camera angle: Level up, close-up. Shot the boy from the side and above the shoulder. (shot length: 4 seconds)
Shot 11: Leaning over the machine, the boy looked at the doll slightly frustratedly and asked, ‘ Can you be my friend?’ The camera shot about the shoulder ( shot length: 6 seconds)
Shot 12: The doll nodded and pressed her hand against the glass. The boy looked at the doll satisfactorily and put his hand against the glass in response. Camera close-up of the doll and the boy’s head (Shot length: 10 seconds)
I am responsible for six shots (7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12) Storyboard made by Cynthia.
Process:
First, all modeling elements were integrated in a scene for the next step of animating. The main things to notice are the import of model resources, model naming, texturing, and lighting. I optimized the scene size and cleaned up the non-deformation history for the next step.
I changed some shots to accommodate some models’ joints that are not very flexible.
Version one:
Version two:
In this part, through discussions with Cynthia and Jonathan, I focused on the camera’s timing, placement, and operation. The shot’s timing has been changed to partly fast and partly slow instead of flat. To make it look more realistic, I recorded the voice myself to improve and smoothen the character’s lip movements.
In fact, we were not satisfied with finishing the animation because we had no more time to polish the animation. We had to allocate time for rendering, compositing, sound effects, etc. Next, we spent five days rendering all the shots.
Rendering process in LCC.
Group process:
3D: Finished animation and rendering
Previs shot Made by Cynthia, Jonathan and me.
2D: Finished the animation of the first shot, some 2D elements that appear in the end credits and shots.
The above pictures and sequence frames are completed jointly by Guowei and Sophia.
The next step:
Sound and Final composition( 3.10 -3.13)
Complete portfolio, rendering video, and process video. (3.12 – 3.14)
I’m having a little problem here when the character takes the bread out of the bag and gives it to the dog. I don’t know how to synchronize the bread location with the hand movements by key each frames. So I choose to use constraint to solve this problem. Also, I set the keyframe of parent constrain in the value column, I set off when I don’t want the bread to follow the hand, and I set on when I want to the bread follow hand.
Feedback:
As in previous weeks, I still categorized issues with my animations so that I could analyze them.
According to the situation last week, I divided the total file into different individual scenes, and I couldn’t preview all the shots, so there were a lot of timing problems. Some get longer and some get shorter. Therefore, I further modified the length of time in a single shot, some extended by about 1 second, and some directly cut off the lengthy part.
Timing
The second part is to refine the character animation in order to maintain a smooth flow in the picture, convey more details or connect the movements of the front and next shots.
details of character animation
Third, it is still a common compositional issue, when the character stays to one side of the shot, make sure the character is always on the same side of the shot.
The title named: The Influence of Globalism and the Audience Have on Aladdin 2019
Key Words
Post-colonialism, Orientalism, Mise en scene, film language
I am interested in the subject of post-colonialism, so I have a divergent thinking on it. The part I am most interested in is Orientalism. So along this line, I found something related to my major, the movie Aladdin.I realized that Mise en scene and narrative of this film could be considered from the perspective of orientalism. However, I am not sure what interesting subtopic are remaining for the post-colonialism theme. I want to get some advice.
Also, for the title that has been set, I have some theories I would like to explore but I am still working on some more literature references.
Some potential content of this paper including:
1. Orientalism
2. Criticism about the new Aladdin and the regional audiences’ thoughts about it
3. Methods and features of this new narrative by the director
4. As a cultural symbol, how such folklore is affected by culture clashing
5. What parallels can be drawn for the film and the original tale
6. How the increasing awareness of culture preservation and the concept of globalism affects the decisions made by Disney in remaking this film.
