STYLES & ART DIRECTION
This post will be about the styles I have experimented on, how I created my frames and my decision to change style because of my overall idea. Link to style 2.
The overall idea when I created these frames were to show the contrast in YIN & YANG and how they compliment each other. The flow of each frame should also tell the story of the lovers, Weaver Girl and the Herder. This sentence really helped me in directing how the elements should flow:
“Yin and yang transform each other: like an undertow in the ocean, every advance is complemented by a retreat, and every rise transforms into a fall.”
STYLE 2
So after looking back at my past design/style I decided to create a different look and feel. To remove what is not important, confusing and making my story harder to understand. I want my idea to be represented without any explanation. So I placed some restrictions in my designs, I’ve removed the colours, keeping it to only black, white, grey tones and adding a touch of red to guide the audience eyes. Using the dominant, subdominant and subordinate concept we learn in Year 1. Also creating very bold and slightly “Asian/Japanese” graphic style, similar to ikko tanaka, Ryuichi Yamashiro, Yayoi Kusama, Jacqueline Casey and Paul Rand. Lastly, the work by Carsten Nicolai really inspired me on how simple shapes and lines can be animated to create very interesting movements.
ARTIST REFERENCE/MOODBOARD
I’ve also found items and graphics around that inspired me to create these designs.
Designs
Not all were selected in my final work. There was a lot of experimentation and figuring out how some designs will work on the big screen. Transforming static designs into moving graphics is very different and challenging. There’s also the scale and speed to consider. It was really fun playing with negative and positive spaces, I just regretted not being able to try out Chinese typography, it seems challenging but interesting. I still think I have a lot to work on, and some works are not balanced enough and not as refined.
Animating them
So planning the movement of my graphics. I brought back this concept of YIN & YANG. “Yin and yang transform each other: like an undertow in the ocean, every advance is complemented by a retreat, and every rise transforms into a fall.”
I’ll be using a mixture of after-effects and premiere pro to animate my designs. I’m not that familiar with AE but this project gave me a chance to learn. However, I didn’t really like the very systematic movement of some of the effects they had in AE, hence I animated most of them by moving each of their points and movement manually. It was tedious and some were not as natural as I want them to be, but it worked and I will continue to work on them.
Here are the experimentation and animations I didn’t use in the end. You can find the final selected animations here.
Here is the black version of the white mountains/sea in my final work. I like this but it was too different to be placed in the final work as it had a gradient background.
Systematic and even robotic looking Droplets. I manually made the droplets appear, grow, and fade off. Timing and speed was important here., but I didn’t use it in the end and the design had a lot of white space which was bad on the giant screen.
Didn’t manage to animate this in the end, because of time and it is too similar to another design. How I was planning to animate this was to break down the pattern waves into pixels.
This is the Red Rain. It was a very bold approach as I was switching what was a subordinate to a dominant element. However, it was really bright on the big screen.
Was playing around with the effects and mixing them to create this. Really liked it… but it’s out of theme.
A zoomed in version of the pattern rain.
Links to research and inspirations
Research: Link
Styles & Experimentation :Link
FINAL: LINK