animation project: labyrinth
We started our collaborative animation project. We are planing to use an abstract concept to describe one’s life. And this one’s life, is the labyrinth of life. Above all, we need to be clear about what is Labyrinth. This is the first time that I make a 2D frame animation. We had a long time in conversation about the theme and story.
Labyrinth is an elaborate maze in Greek mythology. In our animation, I prefer to say the Labyrinth is a concept. If we look at the graph of Labyrinth on the left, we can know the inlet and the ending position, in the journey from inlet to ending there is only one way to go. And whatever you met in the Labyrinth, you will must be getting the ending position. I like to use metaphor with one concept. The Labyrinth is just like the fate of one person. From birth to the death, no one can escape. The only way we go is to let the cycle of life continue. Somebody chooses to have a child to keep running the relay race of life. And it is also a new Labyrinth to your child. We want to present our understanding of life by making this animation.
My role in this collaborative project is making story and concept design. I drew a simple storyboard and gave it to my collaborators. I supposed to begin from the child’s birth, which is the inlet of his life Labyrinth. The world view is that in a place, life ( maybe not human) have a graph on their body. The graph breeds a new life. Then the new life will leave the parent and have its own journey, finally the graph on new life’s body will breed a new life again.
The content of our animation is planed to be two part. The birth of new life, and the road of new life. We will use some abstract animation language to perform. We divided the works. I work on coloring, giving idea and making story. Yun’nuo and A’he work on outlining. Lane works on researching and editing.
We need a certain visual style for our animation, and then we need character design. Therefore, I made some concept arts to let my collaborators pick from them. We think that the style can be more free, and more experimental. I added some random effect by using Photoshop.
( progress of how Yun’nuo draws animation)
We had a long break as result of Christmas holiday. This project was also lay aside for a long time. Recently we started to visualize all our plan. Yun’nuo, one of my collaborators, began from the part describing how the graph breeds a new life. She wanted to perform some art effect. She found the reference from a famous animation based on a traditional story Prince Nezha’s Triumph Against Dragon King. There is a part telling how Nezha rebirthes from a lotus.
After conversation, we decided to make a transform from a graph to a flower, and then the new life born in this flower.
And it is the outcome of her part, which has not been colored. I like the feeling of flowing so much. This experiment is successful for us. Next step is that I color on it, and make it complete. Of course the method I color it is same as how I made our concept design.
At the beginning of our animation, there is a bird flying as an intro. To draw the bird, I found so many reference. Finally my favourite one is the animation from PingPong. I guess the artist used a method which is to outline the frame from videos. It can create an incredible effect. It keeps the advantage of drawing animation and also the movement of video.
( progress of my part)
I found a reference from youtube, which is a recording film of flying birds ( https://youtu.be/a1wp1RnC7kk). I took a lot of screen shots frame by frame. And then I outline them in Photoshop.
Finally I colored the animation. I was changing the hue in background consciously. Thus its effect will be like the outcome above. Now we are still working on our animation project.