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Self Portrait

IDEA
A glimpse at my ridiculously innocent childhood wishes that still remain with me today!
Becoming a dinosaur, befriending an alien, swimming with sharks, they’re all really cool things okay

 

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Since the theme was self portrait, it had to be something that was about us and I wanted to do something fun and simple. I was daydreaming when I suddenly thought of my childhood dreams and decided hey why not! They’re funny and probably a good base to make a motion graphic out of.

By watching countless of motion graphics (and related) videos, I started to get some inspiration and an inkling of how the visuals will look like. I’m extremely enamoured by SIAMES’ music video for ‘Wolf’. It uses shapes and silhouettes beautifully and most of their transitions are actually simple zooming into characters’ eyes and that was simple enough for me to execute.

 


Screenshots from ‘Wolf’ by SIAMES

I started planning and sketching out some storyboards of what compositions and assets I needed.

Following the storyboards, I started working on the actual assets on Photoshop, man there were so many layers. So Many. 


Even the layers have more layers.

Eventually, I’m done and imported everything onto After Effects to start animating everything. It was an experience, fun though. Extremely tedious. I had to go into each ‘scene’ composition and then into each part followed by that part’s part, it goes on and on. I had already started on animating part by part manually when i found out about the puppet tool, and in order not to confuse myself any further I continued manually animating. I’ll definitely try puppet tool next time, looks really effective. I kept realising I needed to redo assets and even make entirely new assets, so that was a challenge. I also combined 2 separate music tracks to create a fitting melody for this motion graphic animation. After all that, I went to Premiere Pro to do some minor adjustments and it’s done!

Overall I honestly really enjoyed animating with After Effects and might actually try to practice and learn more about it on my own time. It was tough to grasp at first but it was a fun experience! Could have planned my ideas better and also my time better for a more satisfying end result, but all in all I’m sort of content with what I have done! It’s been a very productive 13 weeks!

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D R E A M S

Dream from Wong Yi Ting on Vimeo.

CREDITS

Ragamama
Music: http://www.purple-planet.com

RESEARCH

For the topic ‘Dreams’, I wanted to try to do something that was not narrative driven. Something that was slightly more abstract and subtle, but still retained the unrealness that dreams have.

‘Western Spaghetti’ – PESFilm

After dwelling on youtube, I remembered PESFilm‘s quirky strange stopmotion concepts of cooking inanimate objects and knew I wanted to do something similar to his concept. So instead of using stopmotion, I relied on props and editing to express the surreality.

For colours and aesthetics, I went for a more clinical but saturated hue palette. The contrasting aspects make it even more puzzling yet intriguing. I also decided on an old-timey VHS type wave warping to just push the effects more.

STORYBOARD

Storyboarding for this short film was interesting as I had to incorporate a variety of shots for a film that has no full human figure or any models, just objects and a pair of hands. The storyboard above just depicts a general outline of how the film would be, with the shots as a rough guideline since while shooting there were way more shots taken than shown in the storyboard.

EDITING

Since I was not able to shoot this film in a controlled environment such as a studio, the original lighting and colours were quite off through out the shots. I managed to balance the look and colours through editing the lighting, hues and levels in Premiere Pro, going for a saturated, bright, pop look. There was the additional 3D looking edit to just exaggerate the strangeness even more. I wanted to add a ink drip overlay but with the time constraints I didn’t manage to.

The film was made to look like a short cooking segment, accompanied by a chirpy, lively tune. The tune’s melody and tempo made it more capturing when the shots matched up to the beats.

AFTERTHOUGHTS

Working on this made me realise the capabilities of Premiere Pro, and it’s not actually too hard to learn, it’s just that there’s simply so much going on that it’ll take a while to learn everything you could do with it. I’m actually quite glad with what I’ve learnt so far and I wish to continue learning more and use it for future projects! As I’m new to film in general, I realised the restrictions of shooting at home without any proper equipment – unable to control lighting, stabilising shots, etc. I had to rely on my Samsung S8plus camera, yes it has decent quality but it’s just not the same compared to an actual camera and its equipment.

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PROCESS

I decided to use the story from my Visual Storytelling module for this movie campaign project!

STORY

So the character and basic storyline has been set already. The movie will tell a story of an alien astronaut landing on a deserted Earth, exploring and eventually transforming the place into an alien natural habitat. The genres would be lighthearted, sci-fi, family-friendly, exploration.

Did some research on the direction I wanted to try. I like posters that depict action or something akin to a scene that’s played out in the movie itself, like the Star Trek and Casablanca posters. The dynamic strong diagonal lines these posters have creates way more impact than a flat normal shot of something. I included the Below game poster as I like the way it’s simple but has a strong usage of directional lines that guide the eyes and brings all the attention to what’s important.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So I started off with some simple, rough thumbnailing to get a rough idea of how I wanted the poster to look like:

The last one ended up being my favourite

At first, I decided to work on the 3rd thumbnail from the left as it felt the most intimate. However, when I started working on it I realised everything felt very flat and uninteresting? And the colours used made the poster portray the movie in a thriller-y, creepy light – definitely something I was not going for!

Tossed away 🙁

Soooo redo time!! I didn’t like the rest of the sketches so I quickly just drew out a new one and since it turned out decent, it became the finalised version. I used brighter and more saturated colours for this other attempt to hopefully spice it up a little while keeping it a little calm. Here’s some process shots!

The final result after post-processing and adding the text!

MOVIE CAMPAIGNS

MRT Station Advertising

Online Digital Advertising

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First assignment! We were tasked to create 4 images that expressed different emotions.

We could either use photos or digitally paint from scratch and I chose to paint as it’s my point of interest.

THEME: Ocean of Feelings

As these sayings go, ‘you’re drowning in an ocean of feelings’; ‘waves of sadness hits you’, it’s a metaphorical way to describe how emotions can feel to a person.
I wanted to do something that wasn’t too literal in a sense whereby you can directly see the expressive features on a face, instead I wanted the environment or the ‘whole’ feel of the image to evoke its assigned emotion.

HAPPY

Happiness can be bubbly, hyper but what I chose to portray was the more serene and peaceful side of the spectrum. Everything is blissfully relaxing, the girl drawn and shown in clarity as she drifts off in the gentle waves. With the help of brighter, warmer colours, the image looks calm but still gives a sense of Happiness.

Inspired by the pink lakes in Australia that are so strange but gorgeous, it felt like the perfect environment for this emotion.

 

Process

For postprocessing I decided to edit the composition to bring in the girl closer and let the ocean fill up more of the space. And the colours were actually toned down a bit with cooler colours like purple as I realised later on that this image was too bright and popped out too much from the rest.

FEAR

Fear usually means a sense of dread, hopelessness as you fall deeper into depths of the unknown. So with that thought, a deep trench with an unending pit suited what I wished to go for. Real life deep trenches like the Mariana trench and Dean’s blue hole were the references I used.

 

Process

The hues for this are dark and foreboding, with hints of reds to pull in some visual interest. The central top point with the character is the only part that’s sort of illuminated whereas everything aside is hidden by shadows.

ANGER

Aggression, rage and fierceness are associated with anger. This feeling is vicious and strong and pulls you in deep unforgivingly, just like the ocean riptides and whirlpools. Sinking in your own personal riptide of strong emotions can be unrelenting, which is shown by the figure struggling as the water around gushes around without stop.

 

Process

The red and contrasting blue tones create this overwhelming feeling as they clash together to express something chaotic in nature. The character is placed in the centre region with the waves all going outwards from him, which guides the eye to the ‘object of interest’.

DISGUST

A common thing that’s thought to be unpleasant are looking at fish and specifically dead fish eyes. Making use of that fact, and inspired by how when sudden waves of dead fish end up on shore randomly, I drew many fish in a simple but ‘organised’ arrangement, imitating something similar to when dead fish just stack together.

 

Process

Grossness is done with goopy slime usually, which also happens to be green most of the time. I decided to swap to orange as the ‘water’ and green for the fish to kind of create this ‘uncomfortable’, contaminated effect as orange water doesn’t sit well with how clean and natural water should be. As an added effect, all the eyes of the fish are looking towards the character that’s hunched and perplexed.


Overall, this was kind of fun to do as we could experiment on what we wanted. At first I wanted to use daily objects to depict the emotions through the arrangement and composition. After some deliberation, I thought it felt too flat of a concept and changed my theme entirely into what it is now.

Here are just some sketches of previous scrapped ideas!

scrapped early on when initial idea was still Daily Objects

Fear and Disgust was changed because it didn’t feel as fitting

Though on my part, I did not have the best time management so I could not really edit and fix everything that I wished I could. But it was still a decent experience!