Final Assignment Submission

Topic 1: Depict certain weather or atmospheric condition

I reworked the perspective of the houses to be a bit more wonky to give it character. I think the overall colour harmony could have been better, I was trying to be a bit more spontaneous while referring to my colour tests but I think the colours of the houses can be less muddy looking.

Topic 2: Landscape painting

For this landscape painting I tried to focus more on achieving a range of warm greens and yellows with red/orange as the accent colour. I tried my best to redesign the angles of the slopes to have more variation after receiving feedback that the shape design was a bit repetitive. I also took note of the amount of detail I add so that I don’t overwhelm the viewer. Overall I am pleased with how this turned out.

I’ve compiled all of my works into a pdf for submission:

https://entuedu-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/clim101_e_ntu_edu_sg/ES3h02Zvf49OjIU5MqiJRzUBwSQuQCfWd7CgUZF2TfAORQ?e=t2qYkO

 

Final Assignment – Process Part 2

Landscape painting

This is my progress for the landscape painting topic  as I only just started working on it in my previous post. Did some value paintings to further explore possible compositions.

 

But I still prefer what I posted previously in terms of composition, so for my colour test I tried to incorporate what I liked from these compositions. This colour test one has more blue – cyan tint and has a cool tone compared to the previous colour test that I did. I think the previous test worked better in terms of colour harmony. I also feel that there can be a greater jump in values for the atmospheric perspective as now it looks very cluttered.

 

Comparison to previous colour test:

 

I also did a rough master study of Ivan Shishkin’s work to practice colour mixng. After working on it I realised how many layers he needed to paint over in order to achieve the density and richness and I was unable to replicate it in my quick study.

 

 

 

 

I further refined it digitally because I layered too much in some areas and couldn’t get the lighter colours to show.

Overall I think I got the shades of green slightly off as the original had more of a yellowish warmness to them.

It was still a much needed painting practice. 🙂

Will work on the final pieces after this!

Link to previous post: https://oss.adm.ntu.edu.sg/clim101/final-assignment-process-part-1/

Final Assignment – Process Part 1

Chosen topics:

  1. Depict certain weather condition or atmospheric condition
  2. A Landscape or Cityscape
Weather condition / Atmospheric condition

Thumbnail Sketches

Still deciding on subject matter but most likely urban with some buildings.

Master Studies

I want to try painting buildings with evening lighting. I did some master studies of Alvaro Castagnet and Frank Webb’s work. I think the main issue was that I was too scared to go in with more pigment and tend to dilute a lot of the colours with water, which fades after drying. And also because of the that the value structure is slightly off too after drying.

Colour planning

Have yet to decide on the composition but here are some colour variations that I tried out using one of my thumbnails. I tried to use Frank Webb’s approach of tinting the paper first but I think I layered too much for the colours to show through and also the base colours were weak to begin with.

Landscape painting

Thumbnail Sketches

Colour test

Only did one colour test so far, still figuring out composition and the mood that I want. Here I attempted atmospheric perspective with milky greens for the background.  I think there needs to be a greater jump in values for the atmospheric perspective to work. Have yet to do master studies.

References

Mainly for their composition.


Week 9 – Interior Space

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.

 


Assignment 03: A Short film about Dreams

TASK

Create a Mise-en-scene short film depicting ‘Dreams’.

Final film

IDEA / CONCEPT

Dreaming about doing work and waking up to find that the piece of work is not completed is something that I experience quite often myself. I decided to create a somewhat experimental short film that is relatable to the viewer. The start of the film feels ambiguous, we do not know that we are looking at a first person view of the character in her dream. Only at the end then it is made clear that it is a dream. I wanted the overall look and feel of the film to be on the mellow side.

Reference videos

I gained a lot inspiration from experimental films with slow pacing.

STORYBOARD

I intentionally used a lot of close up / medium close up first person view shots as that is all we see or remember in our dreams (unless the dream is third person view). By not showing the character in the beginning and only revealing the face at the end, it would make it clearer that this whole sequence was a dream. I use the drink and chips to show the passing of time in addition to all the typing.

Shooting & EDITING

The film was shot over 2 days (1 day for reshooting shots that I didn’t quite nail on the first day) at Rebecca’s dorm, using the Nikon D7000. Framing the shots was difficult in the small space of her dorm since most of the shots were “first-person view”. The shot of her waking up had to be shot “blindly” because there was not enough room to place a tripod on the table and the lens was not wide angle enough.

 

Since the concept is very simple with a lot of repetitive shots, I tried to play around with pacing. The build-up was particularly difficult to achieve — I had to rework that part multiple times. It might have to do with my choice of shots. Increasing the speed of the clips helped in quickening up the pace of the film.

I also faced some problems with colour grading as the lighting was not ideal. I tried to shoot in natural daylight as much as possible but towards the late afternoon the daylight was not sufficient. We had no choice but to turn on the room lights, which gave the footage a warm tone which was difficult to work with in post production.

I colour graded the shots after the character wakes up to be darker and a cooler tone to give contrast between the two states of being in a dream vs. real life.

 

Sound

Instead of pacing the film around a piece of music, I decided to just include diegetic sound. It was tough sourcing for music that fits the theme and duration of the film as it has to increase in tempo at the right timing. I also tried using softwares to compose my own music but figuring out the softwares took too long.

The audio from the footage was noisy, so I borrowed the Zoom H4n record my own sound effects. I used Audacity to do some simple editing with the sounds after that (mainly noise reduction). Any other sound effects that I couldn’t replicate nicely was taken from freesound.org.

I increased the volume of the sound effects when the cuts of the clips speed up. Reverb was added to the ticking sound of the clock during the dream so that it hints that something is amiss.