Month: November 2021

Talking about my home country’s animation, As a Chinese, the first thing pop into my mind is Water ink animation.

So I started looking on the internet for various histories of Chinese ink painting and researching how it was composed and what it achieved in terms of international status. I found that China produced a large number of ink animations in the 20th century and that the level of ink animation reached its peak during that time, which was a good use of the ink painting technique and style in Chinese painting into animated films. But has there been no more good ink animation in China since then? I didn’t want to think so, so I started to search for good animators of the recent past who had focused on ink animation and had produced good works.

This led me to an animation I saw recently, ‘Valley of White Birds’, where I was amazed by the use of ink painting, combining the watercolour colours with the colour palette of rock colour painting, making traditional ink painting not just a single black and white colour palette, but something new and visually stunning.

I decided to use this film as my entry point and wanted to look further into Chinese painting, which is divided into three main categories:

• Figure painting, Landscape painting And Flower-and-Bird painting.
• Painting techniques can be divided into Chinese realistic painting and freehand brushwork (also commonly known as ink wash painting).

I wanted to find out if there were any more animations in the genre of characters or landscapes that would demonstrate the use of Chinese painting in the new era of animation.

So I changed the theme of my presentation to “The new development of Traditional Chinese Painting Style in Animation” and I started to dig for more animations about Chinese painting, and then I thought of an animation call “56 ethnic groups of China Animation”. This animation comes from Zhou Fangyuan, a recent graduate of the Animation Department of the School of Fine Arts and Design at Tsinghua University. It shows the 56 ethnic groups of China in their costumes, The film uses a lot of transition styles that I appreciate very much, transitions have always been a headache for me, there so much of the transition effects used in this film are worth learning.

At this point the overall tone of my presentation had largely taken shape, with examples of ink and watercolour paintings and portraits, I continued my search for good landscape based animations.

My mind was now more diffused, as I have always been a graphic designer, and I thought, “What if I don’t show animation that tells an animated story? Can we add some other forms of animation?“

I always wanted to explore this direction, the use of animation in fashion, in advertising, and even in showrooms. At this point, the work of a graphic designer in Beijing caught my eye. His series of works are a good collision of digital art and Chinese landscape forms, thus finding a new kind of aesthetic beauty, using multimedia digital art forms to express the mood of Chinese landscape ink rhythm, creating a contemporary landscape form language and interest, extending the Chinese landscape culture and artistic expression.

I think such a work is a good way to show a new form of landscape animation. This work is a commercial work produced by the designer for a fashion brand, and I think it is well adapted to a series of scenes such as brand background animation and can be widely used in exhibitions, runway shows, multimedia promotion, etc.

In the end, I think in this preparation, I only finished the research before the presentation time and did not arrange the time to write my blog, the framework of thinking is also gradually built out in the middle of the research, the front of the idea is very fragmented. I think in the next presentation I will try to use the form to list the time section, to better arrange my time.

Today I would like to write about an animation artist I like very much on Youtube: Dedouze.

He is very good at using blender to create 3D animations with 2D effects and the crayon tool in Blender has been very important in establishing his overall style, allowing the user to draw directly into the 3D scene. The creator can choose to use 3D modelling to aid the perspective distortion of the 2D drawing, hand draw on top of the 3D modelling for a more stylised look or add 3D modelling to the 2D animation for efficiency.

I will explain the role of the crayon tool and his creative process, using one of Dedouze’s works as an example.

Firstly, Dedouze drew the scene lines and set the general colour mood.

He then creates the models of the cable car and the station in blender, while the characters are drawn by hand in two dimensions. The magic of the crayon tool is that it allows 2D and 3D to co-exist in a scene and look natural.

Dedouze shows a frame-by-frame drawing of the girl’s movements behind the scenes, where he can always adjust the rhythm of the movement by watching the back and forth action.

Sometimes Dedouze also uses the ‘auto-frame’ function to make the movements smoother. But he specifically mentions that a mixture of auto-framing and hand-drawing should be used, instead of trying to animate the whole scene perfectly smoothly, as that would take away the charm of retro-animation.

After seeing his work I became very interested in blender and really would like to try this 3D to 2D style of animation in the future.