A good example on visual language- Fallen Art

Fallen Art is one of my favorate animation which has ever won the first prize in 2005 Siggraph. It is made by Tomek Baginski, who made "The Cathedral" successfully in 2002 Siggraph. He is so gorgeous!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7HMz1WKkso

This animation is so perfect no matter in visual language or music. Especially in the middle part, in a dark room, the saturation is low and the shade is almost close to grey. At the same time, it imitates the film particles throughout the whole animation, which convey a depressed mood to audience. According to J.Michael Gilletle in "Design with light", the primary goal of lighting designer is to create an enviromental atmosphere which is supportive of the play's production concept. Under such a visual style we can clearly feel the role's contradiction and abnormal psychological activity. When the character turn on recorder's button, music is on and the machine is beginning to run. The camera moves with that machine in a same rhythm. However it is not rigid but vivid since the movement of camera has proper shake just like in a real film which pushes the story line to a new high.


The whole animation is about 300GB althouth it is only 6 minutes. Baginski introduced that this animation needs to render into 35mm movie format, so they have a large task to unfold textures' UV which definitely need a high quality. This is why we can watch the nice details about everything in animation even in such a grey images.


Reference:

Gillette, J. M. (1989). Designing with Light. The United States: Mayfield Publishing Company.

The film is on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7HMz1WKkso.

Nice Animation- StraBe Der Spezialisten

Today my supervisor Andy show me a fantasitic animation named " straBe der spezialisten" by studio soi. It is incredible that visual style I have never seen before. It is divided into three parts on a line in the screen.

The animation begins at the left side and end at the right side.

During the whole film, the maker sometimes uses all of three images at the same time and sometimes maybe just one or two which are used for promoting the development of drama. The reason why I impressed on it so deeply is I can appreciate the movie more comprehensive.

From the picture above, while the role striking matches, we can not only understand the atmosphere when story happened but also feel his complicated moods at that time through specific action. I have watched it three times and each time I had different experiences. In my opinion this film is worth for watching many times as every time you will focus on different images connecting to another obviously you would have a different understandying about it each time.

It is a good example on my research Visual Language and according to Visual Syntactic Structures by Neil Cohn, McCloud indentified six types of " panel- to- panel" transitions:

1. Action to action

2. Moment to moment

3. Subject to subject

4. Scene to scene

5. Aspect to aspect

6. No- Sequitur


Apparently the maker combine all of them in one aniamtion. It is fabulous. Moreover the character is made by cartoon materials whereas the scenes are three dimentional which has a stronger contrast. It makes the images more powerful.


Reference:

Cohn, N. (2003). Visual Syntactic Structures.

http://www.emaki.net

Solutions of Lighting Design in My 3D Aniamtion

According to my experiences before, there is something troublesome and inconvenient in lighting design of 3D animation making. As pictures of three-dimensional animation are rendered out by computer calculation. In order to obtain a satisfied effect, so many parameters need to be constantly adjusted and a lot of rendering tests are performed, which would obvioulsy consume a lot of time and resources. Especially the final render, it would greatly degrade the efficiency of the whole film making. So It is a major task to reduce the time for rendering as possible as I can.


However, the lighting set is one of the primary elements influncing the rendering efficiency. Generally speaking, the lighting illumination could be divided into traditional triangle illumination and high-level illumination which includes Global Illumination as well as Final Gathering. Global Illumination is through launching photons to imitate the real lighting effect in the world. Such an illumination is a killer for render time as there exists both the refraction and the secondary reflection between the surfaces of objects which would spend a lot of system resources on calculating. Moreover the more numbers of photons, the better effect and the lower efficiency. Apparently, It will take a computer much more time to calculate and to render if you want to use Global Illumination in order to get an ideal lighting effect. Whereas the traditional triangle illumination can hardly obtain such satisfactory effect. How to balance them is what I will focus on in current animation..


" The Ice Age" produced by 20th Century Fox was a good example which has well solved such a problem. The makers got rid of the restriction of high-level illumination, using conventional illumination way created a real and slightly exaggerated effects, which saved lots of time from rendering and made the film lifesome and dynamic. How they could create such a gorgeous lighting effect by the conventional illumination? In my opinion, to obtain a comfortable visual effect on lighting, most importantly, we have to follow the  lighting laws of nature. Animation is a piece of artwork and computer technology is just a tool to achieve. So firstly it is necessary for me to improve aesthetic standard and the master the theory of art. I can treat the lighting design as making a color painting. I will use the Global Illumination as the foundation, but less number of photons. Then to take advantages of complementary color, contrast of warm and cool color tone, create the light one by one according to the art knowledge under the Triangle illumination. According to David Hays( 1989), the book of "Light on the Subject," Colors, like people, will seem different depending on their companions. Clear will seem warm if the other side of the face is hit by cool, or if the background is cool. Clear light may seem cool if its surround is warm." Setting the color and modulating the light intensity step by step is just like painting harmonic color little by little on the canvas. However It will not waste too much time acquire desired effect even though many lights are used. Of course this is just a theory of my analysis and I need a lot of tests to Identify.


The lighting design in Three- Dimensional also has so many advantages over that in the realistic movie. First of all, the intensity of light can be infinitely magnified and reduced. It also could be set to negative number which does not have the lighting object function but can obsorb the light. Second, the brightness of light could be only related with the light position, which has nothing to do with the distance between light and object. Moreover it is flexible that can be set to identify which object need to be light up and which need not. Forth, you can choose whether open the shadow choice, even its shade and color. Most important, object also has the choice whether accept the shadow of other objects. Finally, it could not only simulate realistic lighting effects in reality but also imitate the effects which is not existing in the real world.


Through such a task, it will bring my lighting design and animation making to a new level and high efficiency. Finally I can use light more flexibly and more technically to well express movie themes and my ideas.

Reference:

Heys, D. (1989). Light on the subject. The United States: Proscenium Publishers Inc.

Background and Proposal

I am from Shanxi Province of China and have studied painting for many years throughout my childhood. At the beginning, i was forced to learn fine art by my father since i am not patient enough to keep doing one thing for a long time. So it was hard for me to spend several hours for finishing a piece of paint. However, i was gradually interested in art as i was attracted by colorful world which i could record the landscape using pens and brushes. However it is different from the photography. The painting is subjective which according to the personal comprehension and understanding. Different individuals use different colors.

When i was 20 i studied at Multimedia Department in Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts which was one of the most important choices in my life. I focused on 3D animation on my subject as i can make anything come to truth and give it life. It was amazing. During that period I had awarded in some animation competitions and the works were showed on CCTV-6 Movie channel in China. Also I have participated in writing the parts of lighting design, materials and textures in “XSI/ Softimage Technology” which was published by Chinese Electronic Industry Press. At the forth year I was the only person selected to 11^th Chinese Art Exhibition in Tianjin city in 2009. Finally i was graduated and obtained the Bachelor Degree as the first in my department in 2008.

My dream is to be an animation director in the future. so i came to Nottingham Trent University to learn MA Puppetry and Digital Animation FT for my career. It is definitely difficult for me. Since animation is an integrated art form including paintings, movies, digital media, photography, music, literature as well as many other kinds of art forms. So I have to get relatively wider knowledge and comprehensive theory to support creation especially in visual language, like color of images, camera angle, camera movement as well as lighting design as animation is a kind of video art based on visual language. They are what i will develop and focus on in my future master's project. 

For instance, in my country, Kaige Chen, Yimou Zhang, Changwei Gu are three most famous movie directors whose representative products are " Farewell, My Concubine", " Hero", " The peacock" separately. Moreover Yimou Zhang was also the director of The 29th Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 who gave us an unprecedented visual regale. Previously he was just a cameraman worked for Kaige Chen and when Yimou became a director, Changwei Gu made camera shooting for him. Obvioulsy, to be proficient in visual language is the decisive factor of being a director. They can make the audiences comfortably to understand story line and create some artistic sublimation to implicitly express their thoughts.

In order to improve what I have mentioned above I need to watch more films and animations to understand as well as analysis why directors use such visual styles and how they achieve. Moreover do more practices on color paintings not only i can collect materials for my creation but also improve both aesthetic standards and art accomplishments. Now I am planning for a new animation and I will achieve my proposal through hard effort. Finally I look forward to finishing my master subject successfully!