Concept Artwork For My Senior Project

Here is a very inspiring Quote

"In some aspect I am a Vietnamese boat person. Now maybe I haven't spent 7 days or 8 nights out at sea hiding from Tai pirates or surviving off of food rations. But in some essence I continue to embody myself as a boat person. Plunged, thrust, and seasick by the oscling wave of hardships. I always continue to anchor my determination of coming out of that storm of life alive..."

A quote

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xxBPZBeC5M

- life is always going to be lived through hardship. I want to use my parents history as a metaphor, and not necessarily something that "hardship" is measured to.

Its about time I articulate my thoughts for the Senior Project Proposal In writing.

I never gave much thought as to where I came from. Living in Canada for most of my life I was never attached to my cultural background, instead I mainly focus on who I am growing up here. As I search for ideas for my grad project I begin to ask myself questions like:

What do I want to say?
What comment can I make about the world around me?
What is my understanding of the world? (not much)

I'll start off with something simple like "who am I?" I think this has been used a hundred times and is a bit of a cliche topic but whatever... I have to start somewhere. I begin to draw upon my background for ideas and inspiration for stories I might want to share:

As a child the stories that my parents would share with me are their lived experiences in Vietnam. They would tell me stories of hardship and poverty growing up in their home country. Stories of life on the farm and hardship they would go through when they were my age. They would share the traumas that they went through during the Communist rule, the struggle, and the obstacle they had to face when they escaped their country in search for a better life. Often times I found these stories to be quite depressing as a child and wondered why they would tell me these things, nonetheless these stories would stick with me even if I did not give much thought to it. I understood these stories to be a reoccurring moral that my parents want me to carry throughout my life for example, "To appreciate what I have, and work hard to become something."

What does this mean to my gradproject? I've started researching into the history of the Vietnamese boat people because that's what my parents were. A lot of the information that I found were personal stories that other people shared having been apart of the history. The stories that I've read brought tears to me and they were more horrible and sad than what my parents told me.

Here is the site that I've visited: http://www.vietka.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xxBPZBeC5M


These stories touched me on a personal and emotional level even though my connection with this culture is faint and distant. It wasn't until recently that I looked back to what my parents told me, having to visualize these stories when I was a child and how I perceive these stories back then compared to now. For my grad project I would like to explore more into these personal stories. I'll start from the memories of my parents and also research into the history around it. My goal would be to construct a narrative and have a central protagonist inspired by these personal stories that function as morals. I aim to communicate a moral in my piece and explore a question as to why we tell our children stories similar to what my parents shared with me.

The Result of My Creative Exploration

This is the result of my creative exploration. It is composed of the much different experimentation that I have been doing throughout the beginning of this course starting from the particle test to the noise test. I really wanted to play with cell paintings so I did some background animation on cell. Part of this was because I was really inspired by Yuri Norstein’s work and how he made his puppet on cell and this has got me interested in making my puppets on cells. I was also inspired by Theodore Ushev’s technique of painting on paper which brought me to work with paint in animation for the first time. In my experimentation I was hoping to develop an interesting technique, or try out techniques that has been done before and put my own take into it. There have been some interesting results, the noise as an overlay seems to be working in a very interesting way and it contributes to the atmosphere that I was sort of going for. I am unsure if I want to incorporate the technique of painting in my grad project. The idea of incorporating “noise” as a stylistic element to my piece seems interesting and I would consider it for future use. 

What I wasn’t happy with are the character animation and the structure of my story. All these elements should be the top of my list and I feel with this piece that they were not really defined in some areas. Some of the scenes could use more character animation to show the intent of the spirit and its importance and the importance of the sleeping robot. The features of the creative exploration project I would like to continue with is cutout animation and compositing done on after effects. I would want to research Narrative structures that are found within cutout animation, researching more films that use the medium quite well such as works from Yuri Norstein and Anita Killi’s Shinna Mann. Right now I’m looking into narrative and character animation using the cutout technique. I want to find a design that would complement the limitation that is found within cutout animation. In my research I think I would start by reading short stories and see how these stories are structured. In reading these stories I would hope to develop what I want to say in my film. Because right now I have no Idea what I want to say yet. I still want to develop an aesthetic, this would include and drawing, or hand painting some textures that I could scan into the computer and use as a texture.

Acetate Painting Test

I decided to experiment with painting on acetate. I wanted to see how the background painted noise would look in a scene. The leaves on the branches of the trees does not look like leaves at all but rather boiling paint dabs. I scanned the layers of acetate together to make the final composited Image. The top images is what it looks like sequenced together while the bottom image is a single frame composited image. I think I should take a different approach, however I do like the textures.

note to self: Make more textures, go texture hunting.

My Influences!

 

                                                     

Listed from beginning Image to end

1. Theodore Ushev- Tower Bawher http://www.nfb.ca/film/tower_bawher/
2. Theodore Ushev- Lipsett Diaries
3. Cordell Barker- The Cat Came Back http://www.nfb.ca/film/the-cat-came-back/
4. Cordell Barker- Runaway http://www.nfb.ca/film/runaway/
5. Koji Yamamura- Country Doctor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XpvlrOcEcM
6. Lauis Zoller- Great is The Mystery of Godliness http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnhaRb939M8
7. Yuri Norstein- Hedgehog In The Fog http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRsXU4Q6a0Q

There are many other films that I like but these are the films that stand out to me in terms of visual style and and Narrative. Where Theodore Ushev's Tower Bawher is a great example of using non representational, using movement, colour and music gave great impact to the overall piece. Cordell Barker's The Cat Came Back and Runaway has humor and great use of character animation, timing and pacing.

Yuri Norstein's Hedgehog in The Fog, Koji Yamamura's Country Doctor, and Theodore Ushev's Lipsett Diaries are works of great artistry and poetry. I find the visual styles and techniques in these films to be very interesting.   

Noise Test

For the longest time I wanted to use traditional medium in my work as appose to doing everything digital. I think there is more energy and expression in something that is created by the hand rather than computer generated.

Here is an experiment with painting on paper. The compression quality on blogger is horrible but the effect I was trying to achieve was a painted Noise. At this point I don't really know where to go with this, I'm hoping I can incorporate hand painted elements in my work. By doing this test I discovered that I really like Noise and Randomness! The computer can generate Randomness using Fractal but this is one thing that the computer cannot generate.