Bojing Wu

We choose five keywords which are love, vision, sea, forest, and fall. Our idea is from ‘summer night’ which is an oil painting by Edvard Much from 1893. The main story is about Much dreams of his first love after seven years he broke up with her. We created this animation based on the content of this painting.

This animation is called ‘A vanished dream’, The name comes from an ancient Chinese story about a poor man who comes to a hotel where the owner is cooking, he met a Taoist priest here. While chatting with the Taoist Priest, he complained about his poor life, so the Taoist priest took out his pillow and let the man sleep. The man fell asleep and had a dream in which he was enjoying all the glory and wealth. He woke up to find that the innkeeper’s food was not ready. This story is a metaphor for illusory dreams and unattainable desires, just as the character in our story cannot get his first love again even though he dreams of her. That’s why he feels so bad when he woke up.

Judging from Munch’s mood, his first love is beautiful and glowing in his eyes. So, the girls in our animation should look colorful and not depressed. But because this is also a bad ending, plus this is only a dream, in fact, the person he loves will not come back. So, the background color will be more depressing by comparison. After finishing the whole story, we found that because the animation showed a man’s first point of view, and we were all girls in the group, we had to ask my friend to complete the voice-over.

This is our voice-over: The elation I sense when I see your smile. Is like the first sunrise that lighted the darkest hell. But I woke up eventually, everything seems visionally. As you evanesced like the foam upon the sea wave, The sudden feeling of a pang that seized my heart will be remembered until the grave.

We create drafts and rough directions based on our first impressions of five words, after creating the draft, we did research to refine our draft and create a storyboard. In the first place, we plan to use pixel style for this 20s animation, but because of some reason we think we can’t do that, so we decided to do some motion graphics with Adobe After Effect to make this animation. About the sound, firstly we want to use some music on the internet but we found later it’s not allowed.  Then I made up a chord on the guitar as background music. In order to accord with this content, we trying to transcribe the sound of the sea in a game called ‘SKY’. Fortunately, that’s really successful. Finally, to highlight the sensation of sudden awakening, I used an instrument called qing.

In this project I got a lot of experience with video clips and making motion graphics, for instance, I know many new functions about Adobe Effect and Adobe Premiere, at the same time I taught these functions to my team members, this makes us have better collaborate in this project.

In the beginning, we got our topic and keyword successfully and we have specified the division of work in our team. Even so, we still trying to join every part of this animation as well as possible. My work is used Adobe Effect to make illustrate motion graphics, and I also join to work on the sound production and video clip. However, because none of us did any work during Christmas Brake, we are on a time schedule in the last two weeks, if we could use the time of Christmas break to work on this project, I think we could definitely do much better.

PUPPETS

IDEA: The idea of the animation is from my feeling by last year, in that time I felt very helpless and bored. I don’t know what I want, what I can do in the future, and my friends think so. We are almost like a puppet that is controlled by life and live in a cycle. I hope one day, there have someone or something who can help me to jump out of this circulation.

Weakness: I forget some puppets lines, and this animation didn’t show the cycle of the character’s life. Then I still think the motion of the character needs to develop, to make this more like a puppet.

Stephen is a high school teacher, as well as an amateurish antiquer, he got a thousand antiques in his house. One day he was at home and admiring his collection as usual, suddenly, someone knocked on his door, is his friend Vincent.

“Who’s there?” “It’s me, Vincent.”

“Hi Vincent, it’s been a long time, how are you going? I heard you got a good thing the other day………… OH MY GOD!!”

Stephen still looked down admiring his collection when he opened the door, and he was shocked when he looked up at Vincent. Vincent looked like a dead man with black eyes, a white face, and hollow cheeks.

“Are you okay? I think you need to go the hospital.”

“No thanks……here you are.” Vincent’s voice cracked, and give Stephen a little box.

“What’s that?”

“It’s not important,” Vincent said, “but remember, DO NOT OPEN IT!” Then he walked away.

Few days later, Stephen saw Vincent’s body being found in his house on TV. He turned his head and look the box shat Vincent had given he in that day…….

This picture is made up of three photographs, I used a straight line to divide the photo into two areas. To make this picture more harmonious, I kept the right building to connect the two areas. And the final photograph can add some texture to the picture.

I used a few colors and some simple patterns to make these motion graphics. In the beginning, I made some lines and transformed circles, but I thought the content was too simple, so I added some other elements.