Category: Advanced and Experimental

The basic idea of the Animation

The story focuses on the protagonist, who encounters a strange dragon during her peaceful life, a toy wooden carving similar to the one she had in her childhood. The protagonist’s encounter with the dragon evokes some memories she had lost, reminds her of the psychological trauma she had experienced, and, led by the lively dragon, begins to face up to what she had been afraid to face before and confront her negative emotions. She realises that her current peaceful life was just a fantasy she had created to escape the pain of the natural world and that, in reality, she had never been well. The title, HOCO, is the chemical abbreviation for formalin. On the day the protagonist chooses to escape her painful emotions, all the pain feels like it has been soaked in a formalin solution and locked up in a bottle.

The inspiration

This story tells the story of the same protagonist and animal in two periods. Ten years ago, the protagonist and the animal had their first encounter, and they had very fond memories. During these ten years, they experienced various illnesses, accidents, partings and other reasons. The protagonist’s spirit received a huge blow, and she started to run away from life. Like a part of life has been taken away too. But the animal becomes a Ghosts animal ten years later and meets the protagonist again. Although the protagonist does not recognise the dragon at first, by chance again, he remembers their memories, finally lets go of the knot, and accepts that his beloved pet has left him.

So this piece is inspired by a story I have experienced, and for some reason, I have been trying to escape from painful memories. The dragon is based on my cat, my cat came to me in my darkest days and stayed with me for six years, but she has recently fallen ill; thankfully, she is a strong cat, and she hasn’t left me yet. But I’m terrified of returning to those dark days, so I wanted to use this piece to tell the story of the pain I’ve experienced over the years, string together my illusion, and paint an animation from a fantasy world. At the same time, it’s a way of urging myself not to dwell on the pain, finding redemption from animation, and a form of art therapy for the creator to help himself.

Significance:

This film focuses more on people who have been traumatised and thus developed an escapist mental disorder. For example, although I have not experienced the loss of a friend or family member to make a comparison, I think that the shock and grief of the loss of a pet can surpass the loss of a friend or family member. Because the love our pets give us is so pure, so pure that there is not a single impurity – they don’t judge, they don’t see any flaws in us, they don’t think we are not good enough, they don’t fight with us, they don’t hold grudges, all they will have is unreserved love and dependence, and in their eyes, we are all perfect. Because they did not know the meaning of death, they loved us passionately even up to the second they left. This love is too good and precious, but everything good has a high price – the untold grief of loss.

Significance in literature-Wasteland Punk

The anime’s idea involves many references to the culture of the wasteland, which refers to the beauty of living in the present without thinking about yesterday or looking forward to the future. It is more of a reflection and a mockery of contemporary civilisation and humanity, as described in the slogan War, War never changes, and the Leibovitz hymn, culture is always reincarnating.

Its fascination lies in the idea of the good old days gone by, the great contrast between the tattered good old days and the cold reality. My fascination with the wasteland is a desire for the collapse of the existing rules of order, for the deconstruction of all meaning based on human civilisation, for people to forget the constraints of the past and live in this space for instinct and truth, even reckless madness. Although it has the most decadent shell, it is the most humanistic.

A fascinating element to scrap culture is the destruction of the existing order. I was particularly fond of the wasteland genre in my high school days. At that time, I would see the wasteland as an escape from the order in my life. There I didn’t have to worry about the pressure that school, teachers and parents put on me; I became my master. In the Waste Land, there was no longer an authority that could bind me to my actions. At the same time, something about imagining myself surviving independently in the wasteland, in the wilderness, gave me the feeling of being in control of my abilities. In that environment, my work translates directly into tangible results, rather than the meagre grades I received at school, which rewarded me for my studies. Like the wastelands, the magical worlds also provide me with a sense of escape from the natural order of things.

Artist references:

I followed some artists who focus on digital media emotionally during production. For example, nick verstand explores consciousness, perception, and the relationship between personal emotions and space through immersive interactive installations. He pointed out that intangible emotions are represented with flowing light, using the sound and pattern of the installation to resonate deeply with our consciousness. This helped me in my initial storyboard planning and helped me to keep thinking about how to use sound and visuals and lead the audience into the forest of animation with virtual animation scenes to continue the author’s exploration of emotion and perception.

Reflection & Critical Analysis

Pros: I think the better part of my film is that I focused on building the whole environment, I spent a lot of time working on the details of the scenes and the plant animations, I wanted to achieve something like an animated film, and I wanted to work on my full production skills, I hope I could use what I am good at, and I have been learning something that I am not good at.

Cons: As I’ve worked in a game company before, I’m not really familiar with the animation department, so some of the butterfly animations don’t look as vivid and natural as they could, and I’ve wasted a lot of time creating textures, which is unnecessary when you look back after the film is finished. For example, I spent much time creating the grass material sphere. I wanted it to have a natural, beautiful colour and a little sparkle to the whole environment, but this added to my workload and led to spending over 100 hours tweaking the environment.

The importance of communication: In class, the students have also given me a lot of advice on how to make changes. For example, I was advised to promptly adjust the time allocated for each part of the production. I was also given a lot of help regarding voiceover and sound effects. I struggled for a while when writing narrative text lines in the animation and how to use text to complement the animation and help me find some inspiration.

Final animation 

1. Problems with storyboard and dubbing: When I was drawing the storyboard, I had to revise the script and storyboard many, many times, as well as having to think about how to implement it in 3d animation. In my first version of the previs draft storyboard, I could only do a little model, scene, and character-making in a month. So it was only in the fifth week that I finalised all the scripts, copywriting and the film’s overall style. I was always trying to find inspiration and find my creative style. After long deliberation, I used my voice to tell the story. However, I probably wouldn’t use this voice in the final animation. Still, now the spirit is a short reminiscence film, and I need to render a plain and sad story through sound and image. Hence, this design solution is the best solution for me.
2. Rendering problem: I used octane render because it has a sense of Vintage movie atmosphere when rendering the animation. I like it, it is also my best plug-in, but because the overall length of the animation is still relatively long, I do not want to spend too much time on rendering scenes, so I am considering some scenes with UNREAL 5 to produce, but I rarely use this software before, at the same time we are facing a lot of courses and assignments this semester, I really do not have time to divide to learn this software. I hope I can master this software in the next semester.
3. Allocation of time: As the memory animation is critical in my whole film this semester, the scenes in it will all find their corresponding elements in the final animation, so I spent a lot of time during the month building scenes, doing materials, rendering, which also used some plug-ins and resources, especially in the rendering aspect I encountered some I had some problems with rendering, such as noise, tone, post-production editing, etc. It took me a lot of work to complete the animation quickly. To be honest, Attendance, daily assignments, workshops, etc. I really had very little time to focus on one project this semester. The backlog of physical and psychological reasons led to a lot of stress, which caused me to suffer some physical problems and delayed the production schedule for another week. But fortunately, I eventually managed to finish the film to the best of my ability.

2D Storyboard

This is the storyboard for the whole memory sequence, with the wind blowing through the grass, the blue butterfly flying aimlessly through the forest, and the blue butterfly representing the main character I will follow in the next project. The tiger head toy means the dragon that will appear later. The whale lives in the deep sea, and the butterfly lives in the air. According to the natural law of the real world, they should not meet.. 52 Hz of the whale lives in the lonely sea, he cannot hear the voices of his companions, and it lives alone all the time. But one day, it feels the presence of the butterfly.

Appreciation

I am very grateful to my friends and teachers who gave me advice in making this animation and to some of my seniors for their guidance. I struggled with characterisation and 3D modelling, binding and set design before I started this film, and I had some difficulties in each part. Because the second-semester previs production inspired my project, George helped me in all aspects of how to develop the project during this time. I also used much of the footage set up in Previs, the cinematic language in the final semester of animation. Micheal gave me some guidance on character design and video noise reduction, editing, and his advice was very helpful, especially regarding time planning and how to develop the project. I wanted to do some shots in 2d combined with 3d, but this term was short, so I only did most of the sketching and colouring, not all of it, and I still want to try 2d next time to see how it works. I am very grateful to them and the teachers I met in the workshop who gave me good advice on my project. I enjoyed sharing ideas with different teachers and students; it was the most critical part of the semester for me to learn.

The early stages of the FMP project (PLAN)

June
Project 2： completes part of the animation
July
Complete storyboard and main character modelling bundle
August
Complete modelling bindings for the dragon
September – October
Start of animation and effects
November
Begin rendering, posting, compositing, editing

Final Plan.

3D Storyboard

Environmental design process video

I did not record the whole process as I used different software and computers at school and at home. I have edited some of the production processes into a video, which is a personal habit of mine, as I like to review the previous footage after I have finished it so that I can more efficiently identify any mistakes I made at the time, the animation and camera settings, and organize the use of plug-ins.

Weekly animation assignments

1：Body Mechanics Spline

The sound in this video comes from lines in the film Farewell My Concubine, about a theatre actor dressed as a woman who is so immersed in the play that he has trouble telling the difference between reality and drama and shouts to another actor, “No, it’s a lifetime, not a year, a month, an hour, not a lifetime”.

I chose this voiceover because I thought the scene was so emotionally charged that I wanted to create a 10-second animated reference video of the sadness of being abandoned through this line.

There were a lot of wave and ik and fk conversions included in the design of the movement and a few times, my file showed errors, but luckily I found a solution to the problem in the end.

2：Lip-Syncing Animation

I shot my lync-animation video reference and chose the quote from Avatar “Just relax, and let your mind go blank. It shouldn’t be hard for you. I designed some relaxed, helpless, awkward movements in response to this quote

Weekly animation assignments

Idea Development

For my lip-sync animation, I have used the quote ‘just relax and let your mind go blank,it shouldn’t be hard for you ’ from the movie Avatar.

During the week, I animated the facial expressions, and I think the most challenging part was finding the accents in each line and how to make the animated character’s facial expressions more exaggerated, lively, funny and fitting to the pipes.

The mouth animation was the most challenging part for me to control, the speed of the transition from the ‘O’ sound to the ‘U’ and how to make the characters’ mouths relax quickly when they are not speaking. These were difficult for me to grasp, and I spent a lot of time adjusting the transitions between the tones. Although he may still seem to have some problems, hopefully, I can continue to tweak this animation over the holidays.

Reference video & Blocking & Spline

Project 2：Shot render test

During the week, I finished rendering and presetting all the footage, For the rest of the week, I needed to think more about editing things such as I wanted to have, car sounds, whale sounds, and wind sounds. I also used some loose material in the sound of the video, some sound effects that I had recorded myself, and some sounds that I had recorded myself.

For post effects, I used Magic bullet denoise 3 to reduce the noise on my footage, I wanted the noise to be partially retained, but I didn’t want that much noise, so I used this plug-in for each shot to reduce the noise.

In the first shot, I used a push shot, gradually advancing the screen from black to reveal a meadow, tree house, and mushroom forest.

I set up the shot with some design in the butterfly’s animation path and the screen’s layout. The visual centre of the shot shifts from the butterfly to the scene and then from the scene to the butterfly to enhance the interaction between the shot and the animation

In this series of shots, the image will move from a butterfly in a bottle to one, two, and three bottles, meaning that the fantasy is pulled into the accurate picture. This shot is inspired by the butterfly effect and Inception, and I wanted to make a loop that recently ends the episode as the butterfly approaches.

Used Magic Bullet suite in after effect – reduce noise

Make Dubbing & Sound & Effect &Music

Dubbing text:

When the universe awakens from the dream of formalin
Glowing umbrellas of mushrooms fall in the forest of light
Dandelions line up in the waves and jump into the sea

In a dream
I smash open the toy box of my childhood.
The tiger head toy my grandfather carved for me is scattered across the grass.
I have dreamed of a blue butterfly many times
It seemed to be dancing, and it seemed to be chirping

I fell into a dream
In my dream, I hid in a tree house in the forest
Leaning against the damp trees
Staring at the light coming through the leaves
The light was ignoring me
I wasn’t looking at the light either

Phoneme “B” &”O” &”REST”

This week I’ve been blocking. I shot two videos, one I thought had better expressions and one had better movement, so I wanted to combine the two reference videos to make it.

Some minor difficulties I encountered during the production

It took me 6 hours to render 6 seconds of animation before, I thought at first that I had too much grass, animation, plants, and fog added to my screen, but Micheal and I said that my slow render rate might have something to do with my settings, so I went home after class and went through my individual files one by one and finally, I found the cause of the problem, due to a version issue my GI values had been scaled up many times, which meant that my rendering rate was much slower than that of other renderers.

Sculpting of models

I completed the sculpting of this toy as it will become a flying dragon in my graduation project. I modified the model many times, especially the head, and then added a pair of ears and whiskers to give her a richer look. At the same time, this meant that I had to add some more work in terms of rigging and animation, but the result is really good so I chose to continue with this solution

Making the materials

I initially wanted to make a rough wood material, but I found that the toy just blended in easily with my background, so I opted to make a more detailed material for visual effect. I wanted it to be rougher and to reflect some of the green of the grass from the surroundings.

Render test &Neat video renoises in after effects

I tried using Neat video this week to reduce the noise on the screen, it worked really well for some shots, but for shots with butterfly animation, it blurred the movement of the butterfly. So I’m still a bit dissatisfied, and I need to find another plugin to reduce the noise in my images.

Using Neat Video for noise reduction in After Effect, I can control the level of noise increase and decrease by checking the frame with the highest value of noise, this works well, but the disadvantage is that it also blurs the image quality, so I am looking for other solutions.

limbs and eyebrows

During the week, I worked mainly on the limbs and eyebrows. I was thinking about how to make the animation more exaggerated and vivid based on the reference video. Some subtle expressions can very much affect the vividness of the whole animation.

For example, during ‘just relax’, he would wave his hand, squinting his eyes and smile, revealing that it was no big deal.

Next, during ‘let your mind go blank’, he tilts his head, points at his own head, and quickly puts his arms in the air. It has a slightly severe and persuasive feel to it.

Building a forest of glowing mushrooms

I wanted my mushrooms to be a circle of light in the middle, thus achieving a dreamy effect. I tried some materials to achieve this effect. Still, the glowing feeling was not enough, so I set up an aperture inside the mushroom and made the mushroom material refractive so that the mushroom would glow inside and give off a faint glow. I also baked some plant animations to create a large scene of the mushroom forest.

Making a butterfly

This week, I worked on the modelling and binding of a butterfly. C4d is not as good as Maya or blender when it comes to complex bindings, but when it comes to simple creature bindings, its masking system is excellent and very simple to use. I have created different materials, using some real butterfly patterns and some hand-drawn patterns.

Video of Butterfly rigging

This video is a demonstration of some of the weights and mapping. As this rigging was easy for me, my focus during the week was mainly on the animation of the butterfly and the flight path, i.e. the camera lens setup.

The first reference video shooting

This week, we shot our second lync-animation video reference, and I chose the quote from Avatar “Just relax, and let your mind go blank. It shouldn’t be hard for you. In response to this quote, I designed some relaxed, helpless, awkward movements. Still, during the first video shoot, I was so focused on my facial expressions that the reference didn’t seem very ‘animated’. So I went back and did a second take

The shooting of the second reference video

During this shoot, I realised a situation… It was… I had a hard time controlling my expressions and my body at the same time, and my God, this video is what I look like after so many takes, it was really awkward at the beginning… I wanted a vivid expression and regular body movement, so I edited the two parts together, and I’ll make the animation from both videos later on

Storyboard:

This is the storyboard for the whole memory sequence, the wind blowing through the grass, the blue butterfly flying aimlessly through the forest, where the blue butterfly represents the little girl I will be following in the next project, and the lost state of mind of the little girl. The tiger head toy means the dragon that will appear later. The whale lives in the deep sea, and the butterfly lives in the air. It should not have been met. 52 Hz of the whale lives in the lonely sea, he cannot hear the voices of his companions, and it lives alone all the time. But one day, it feels the presence of the butterfly.

Making the OC material

one of the things I really like about the octane renderer is that each category on his settings page is exceptionally clean and perfect for one person’s work. I watched some videos of grass when I was working on my textures, and the grass I started with, I thought it lacked some realism. So I wanted him to have some reflections, refractions, and roughness.

Because I want this grass to have a feeling of just raining, there is that kind of wet dew, so I spent a lot of time to adjust the material

Because the entire lawn has a great impact on the overall color tone of the picture, at the same time, the values of some environments, lighting, and volume fog will affect the entire environment, so I prefer to make this scene in the feeling of myself