Thursday 23 October 2008

PHOTO REFERENCE AND MOOD BOARD RESEARCH

FIRST REFERENCE PHOTOGRAPHS


Were done at college with a Japanese student. I was trying to catch some moments from the film to clarify my vision of the actions, camera angles, deformation of body in different perspective angles, the foreshortening, the facial expressions, positioning of the character in the space,the general feel and colour.






A few days ago I met a really beautiful Japanese girl called Ayano. She resembles the spirit of Sadako in a form of modern Japanese teenager.

I was very happy when she said she would love to pose for reference pictures for my animation:

For the run and the fall:



For the mourning face:



For making if the cranes:



Fir the hand puppet- crane:



The sorrow:



The connection between the "Bomb sequence" and the "Sorrow sequence":



I need these references to see how light behaves when hitting the skin, the Japanese features, facial expressions, the movement of the body.

To study the body movement even better I decided to take camera out and film the action (the run) from different angles, which will help us to decide about timing for animatic and wull aslo serve as a great drawing reference in 3rd term.









Reading about Sadako's life, visiting the clothing department at Albert Victoria Museum, also researching the pictorial material I found out some interesting facts about clothing culture at that time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukata

http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/asia/kimono/index.html


school uniforms:




expensive kimono

























hospital clothing



FIRST STORYBOARS- ROUGH ANIMATIC, BUILDING NEW ASSETS AND FINAL ANIMATIC

New Animatic


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BAnYGbkYZI


It was just then that I tried out how it works to put collaged background together with hand drawn body, I also decided to change a few shots to clarify the story a bit more.At that time I still had an idea of putting different animation techniques together (2D, 3D and live action).


Building new assets (backgrounds and character poses)


I redraw all the characters positions with ink and watercolors, to get closer to the preferable look of the film.











Backgrounds were done in Photoshop, using different photo references, collaging them together into a completely new composition. I used only materials that resembled japanese origami or paper cutouts to express the idea of fragility of the subject matter.


ROUGH ANIMATIC


We decided to do the first version of the storyboard. Despite nice look, all its in-between cuts of rhythmic montage made it confusing and rather hard to follow for someone who is unfamiliar with the story.


ROUGH storyboard





After building a Mood Board and group discussion of the two mayor ideas for the film I decided to storyboard them both in pencil. In the first version of the idea we would start with character dying in the beginning and the whole film would be flashback on her fight for achieving her wish to run again. In the second one the time would progress more analytically, we would show her past in the beginning, then progress to the hospital scene where she dies. So first one more optimistic, second more pessimistic version.