Chi’s World – Self Portrait Motion Graphics

Task: Create a motion graphic piece that uses animated images, shapes or footages to express yourself. The piece can be a literal expression or yourself or a projected/imaginary self in the future.

Final Piece

Concept

What a lot of people don’t know is that under the reserved facade that I show, I am in fact a little bit crazy as my mom would like to call me, haha. I thought it’d be interesting to show that aspect in the form of animation. I used a plain container box to represent this facade. I would then open up the box to reveal colours spilling out, to represent the “inner” me that is often reserved for family/close friends.

Storyboards

The initial idea of colours spilling out was kept. However in the end I cut out the alien part (that was meant to represent an “external force”) due to time constraint (and also uncertain of solution). I added in scenes as I executed the shots, based on what feels right.

Inspiration

Besides actual motion graphic animations, I was actually inspired by Japanese poster designs. The colour schemes are extremely striking yet harmonised. The visuals of the posters also prompted me to think back on things that relate to me back then and now, which became the motifs included in the short.

PROCESS

I tried to visualise the final outcome through more detailed storyboards. The toughest part of this project was planning out the shots and transitions.

I created the assets in Illustrator (characters / motifs) and Photoshop (background). I animated them fully using After Effects.

 

I had trouble with this cat popping out sequence as I did not know how to go about animating swirly lines at first. I thought of using Stroke but the lines were too rigid for what I was going for. I decided to look around for tutorials and found that using Roughen Edges and Turbulent Displace helped achieve the soft liquidly feel. I was still dissatisfied with the look as the lines had uniform width throughout. So I installed a Tapered Stroke plugin to achieve the tapered ends.

 

I also tried using the Puppet Tool for simple fish animation.

 

 

The worlds that I created convey a childlike innocence and playfulness, which reflects who I am inside. The art style is pretty flat and hand drawn to go with the playful theme of the animation.

Takeaways

This is my first ever project done using After Effects. The main takeaway would be that projects using After Effects requires lots of planning. Surprisingly I did not face much problem with the actual execution since I could easily look for solutions online. I was mainly stuck at the transitions because I did not plan those well enough. I also underestimated how much assets I’d need to create.

Through the project I learnt how to use different effects, some of which were not taught in class like Turbulent Displace and Roughen Edges. Overall, I think I am now less intimidated by the software.

Hot Waters – Final Animatic

This animatic is based on the news article about a woman who poured hot water on another woman. I chose to tell the story from her lawyers’ POV, when they meet the woman for the first time.

Final Animatic

Inspiration

The art direction is kept very simple with rough linework and blocky colours, inspired by a short film from Tokyo University of the Arts. (アニメーション「就活狂想曲」GEI DAI ANIMATION “Recruit Rhapsody”). In terms of characters, HERO Season 2 provided a good reference point for me to start building my characters.


Characters

I started by coming up with basic character bios for the three characters. The difficult part was creating personalities that clash to provide interesting interaction. I find that after establishing basic qualities and moving straight to character design helped visualise the personalities of the characters better for further adjustment.

Working Storyboards / Script

Initially, I worked from storyboards. However I realised that my animatic was going to be driven by dialogue, which made the storyboarding process very difficult since I had no idea what my characters were saying. So I created a script. This part of the process took up the most time, and it was also the most challenging part of the entire assignment. In the end, I did not adhere to most of my working storyboards, and I cut some parts from the script to not make the animatic too draggy.

In the story, I intended to show

  • Why the investigations and trials are taking so long over such a small matter -Possibly because of Ms. Wani’s personality
  • How Ms. Wani blew up the situation over something small
  • Her possible “lies”
  • How the lawyers are handling her situation (Not very well)

Click here for HotWaters script.

Visuals

There are two flashbacks in this sequence. To distinguish the two settings better, I used a different colour palette for the flashback scene. For the lawyer’s conference room, I used a blue – green colour scheme.  For the flashbacks, I use a purple – pink colour scheme. This is why Ms. Wani’s colour scheme feels out of place in the conference room scenes. The colours of her clothes and hair are matched with her “flashback” to show that that is her “world”.

Lawyer’s conference room.
Flashback 1.
Flashback 2.

 

Towards the end, we see one of the lawyers losing patience, as shown through the feet tapping. We don’t know who it is, as the colours of their pants and shoes are intentionally made the same. It is revealed at the last frame that Cody was the one who burst, even though he seemingly kept his cool throughout. I wanted to show how frustrated the lawyers are with the case.