Les Nuits des Bassins Is cooperative work which is different from many projects that I made before. We need to make animation or short films and put them on all kinds of screens and interact with the audience. This is my first time to make this project like this. So it is difficult for me to imagine what does it look like. Therefore, to make research, I went to the National Gallery and viewed Nalini Malani’s exhibition ‘animation chamber’. She collects paintings from the National Gallery to make an animation and put it in a room. This exhibition gave us some inspiration.
In the beginning, we thought of some themes for our work. Finally, we decided the ‘Choice Difficultly’ as our theme. But we had different opinions when we discussed our theme. I hope we can use the lines and shapes to express emotions that a person has when he needs to choose something. But my group members would like to express our theme through some real things, for example, problems of love relationships. However, I am worried about if we use this idea to make our animation it is quite hard to appeal to the audience. After discussion, we decided to focus on abstract design.
Regarding character design, the first difficult part for me is how to make our character’s shape interesting and impressive. I try to use all kinds of shapes to describe it. Then to make our character has Size contrast. I drew a small head and a big body. After that, I remember split is our keyword. So I tried to design a simple shape, which can express this word. Finally, I decided to use a line to describe the nose and mouth of the character. Unfortunately, this design brought a second problem to me. During the animation, this character needs to move his head. because of this line, when I move his head, his face will look very strange. In this part, I also tried many ways to solve this problem. Finally, I tried to perspective principles to make his 2D face become to 3D face. So that this line can change with the head moving. Meanwhile, I didn’t draw the neck of the character because I wanted this character to look more flexible. During this step, I realized that next time, I need to combine the character design and animatic test, which can help me to save time to modify the character design.
After we second presentation, I found we forgot to combine our animation and screen. Therefore, I researched artworks with the screen which same as our work again. I found two short films and animations with different screens. They all have strong visual styles.
Because the background of our pre-research inspired us, we decided to use a collage to describe the background, and then use After effect to do the visual effect. Editing I helped more on the side, such as helping to do some visual sketches, added some details in our material, and adjusting details with After Effects and photoshop.
I made a simple schedule. After the second presentation, I found that we were very tight on time, so I discussed this problem with my member and signed and listed things that we need to do. I think we should have listed the schedule at the beginning, but we all neglected this thing and because of tight time we almost couldn’t finish the assignment. Although we finished the animation in the end, I think we can do a better job if we prepare our schedule.