Category Archives: DA9012-MEDIA ART NEXUS (TUT) 2019/20 Sem 1

Final Project

Desert Dragon – Final

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After much work, here is our final product!

Here are the individual panels:

We start away from the dragon, viewing the dragon twist and turn around the screen, it’s skin the colour of sand.

We are then moved closer in to see the individual scales of the dragon as its body worms past the screen. Its scales are reflective.

Finally, we are brought inside the dragon. It’s like a tunnel that snakes and moves as we travel through it to reach the end, suggesting the winding and turbulent road travelled by merchants who journeyed across the silk road.

 

 

Process: Prototype(s) and Storyboard

Elphi – Storyboard and Prototypes

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Storyboard and colour scheme:

We plan to have 3 clips to our entire video, each running about 30-40 seconds long.

First panel: Our first clip shows the dragon’s exterior. Its body is rocky, mimicking the trails of the silk road that traders had to cross to reach foreign lands to trade. The body wraps the top and bottom of the frame and its body simultaneously moves inwards and outwards, as if circling the frame.

Second Panel: We move closer towards the dragon’s body to reveal its scales. The body snakes side to side and we see the light reflect on its scales.

Last Panel: We finally move inside the dragon. We move through its body as it moves. It is as if we are journeying through the silk road itself as we move through the dragon’s body and head towards the light.

Prototypes:
Prototypes and Development for First Panel:

The first panel was inspired by the mountainous landscapes of the silk road. We wanted to use these silhouettes of the landscape to mimic the scaly skin of a dragon, and have the layers of landscape move in and out of the screen to show the movement of the dragon. It gives the overall idea that the silk road is the dragon.

taking reference from the first image above, we came up with our first prototype:

For this prototype, we had the landscapes mirror each other on the top and bottom diagonal of the frame. while one landscape moves inwards, the other moves out. This gave the idea that the dragon was moving around the frame. We also overlayed the architecture of the Elphi building in the second reference photo above to create textures on the mountains.

After a consultation session with Prof Ina, we realized this panel did not match up to the other panels we had made due to its 2D nature as compared to the more 3D nature of the other 2 panels. We decided to reveal the dragon’s body more in this panel, while still using the textures from the Elphi building to create the scales of the dragon.

Above are some examples of images and shapes that we took reference from.

Here is the prototype we designed:

We moved from Adobe Illustrator to using Trapcode Tao in After Effects to create the dragon’s body. The dragon snakes around the frame of the screen. We made an organic ring that twists and turn as time progressed. Upon further consult with Ina, we realized that there was too much negative space visible on the screen. We decided to make the dragon’s body longer and more winding.

We layered and animated individual rings of the dragon’s body to fill up the screen and give the impression that the dragon’s body is twisting and turning in front of the viewers’ eyes.

Prototypes and Development for Second Panel:

Our inspiration for the lights and scales came from these images of the Elphi building in the design brief shared by Thorsten Bauer. We used the first image to create light patterns for the scales in our first prototype:

Upon further feedback, we added more light and dimension to the scales:

Prototypes and Development for Last Panel:

This last panel is inspired by the hallways and their winding like nature in the Elbphilharmonie.

We were also inspired by this specific design shown on a youtube video tutorial on Tao Trapcode:

We begin first by creating layers of outlined rectangles on After Effects and made them sway left to right to mimic a dragon moving, as well as moved the rectangles closer to the screen to make it look as if the viewer is moving through the dragon:

This prototype helped us visualize better how we would like the movement of the dragon to look like. With that, we tried our hands at Trapcode Tao and attempted to recreate the image we saw in the video:

While we achieved a tunnel effect, the tunnel was too geometric and not organic enough. Through more research and experimenting with the software, we discovered another method through the tutorial here.

We hence created a more seamless tunnel above that could also move and “evolve” to mimic the dragon’s moving body.

Finally, we added scale-like textures to the body and refined its shape to give it a more organic look:

 

My Work, Research: Mood Board

Elphi – MOODBOARD: Desert Dragon

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  1. Beginning: Our mind map, with focused points highlighted

2. Write up and Inspiration

One thing that came to our minds while we were discussing different concepts was the idea of dragons that are very often used in Chinese folklore that both of us were extremely familiar with. Growing up listening to tales of flying dragons inspired us to materialise and make tangible what we think dragons look like, based on the stories that we grew up listening to, as well as our own imagination.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dragons have served to be a source of guidance and hope in Chinese folklore and even in modern-day stories as well. In the Chinese folklore, The Four Dragons, four dragons bring water to the desperate villagers in China, and ultimately selflessly transform themselves into the four winding rivers of China. In this folklore, not only do the dragons provide water for the villagers, but they also become the resource itself – the rivers – that act as life-giving and guiding sources for the Chinese. Similarly, Mushu in the movie Mulan acts as a form of guidance and protection for the protagonist throughout the film. We want to tie this in with this year’s theme of the “Silk Road” by combining elements of the dragon and the silk road together. We want to bring forth the idea of the dragon as a source of guidance and resource for merchants during their journey on the silk road, as well as the idea of the long and winding body of the dragon resembling the winding paths of the silk road.

 

While doing some research on how dragons look and the way they move, we realised that each artist has their own individual take on these magical creatures, hence we decided to take on the challenge of creating a new image for dragons to pay homage to what the creature stands for. 

 

What we want to focus on for this project is not on how the dragon looks like as a whole, but instead we want to focus on what it represents and what we find the most intriguing about these magical creatures, while holding on to the element of mystery. Hence, we decided to focus on the unique texture and movement of a dragon for this particular project, as it is simple yet captivating.

3. Artist Reference

A simple inspiration board created with photos from Pinterest.


A gif from the inspiration board

4. Methods and Techniques
  • We want to focus on one or two colours and the experimentation of its tones. Here are the colours and shades we will be experimenting with.

  • We want to focus on keeping the video monochrome with some sand shades.
  • We also want to focus on the organised movement of Geometric shapes (as seen from our inspiration board)
  • Tools we want to use:
    – After effects
    – Illustrator
    – Cinema 4D
  • We are also considering overlaying sandy/grainy textures over our videos.
5. Individual Timeline (As of now)