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Usually, a good animation that catches the eye and is remembered by the viewer has one thing in common: a strong plot twist, that is to say, a plot that surprises the viewer, both in terms of plot and characterisation, and that will be remembered by the viewer in a short time. If the narrative is bland, the audience will not remember it, no matter how beautiful and rich the images are.

In class, teacher Lucy Lii analysed several common characterisations and asked us to make connections, for example a character who is a mother but a demon at the same time would give the whole story a sense of mystery and make you feel connected to the character.

I have compiled a few of the characters that my teacher mentioned in class, and they are:

• Maiden

• Monarch

• Mother

• Child

• The Hero

• The Devil

• Trickster

And when creating a character, try asking these questions:

1. Where do they feel safe?
2. What are they scared of?
3. What do they want?
4. What other archetype do they like?
5. Who do they dislike?
6. What do they find easy?
7. What do they find hard?

I found that by answering these questions, a complete characterisation emerged clearly, with each character having their own ideas and distinct personalities, and so that later in the scripting, each character had their own framework, which prevented the ideas from running out of steam and avoided situations that did not fit the character’s own personality.

This storytelling lesson today has been very insightful for me. Every time I watch a film I analyse the qualities of the characters that are particularly memorable, and you will find that almost every film you can see on the market has these characteristics, and I think this will be very helpful for me in creating stories in the future, mastering these methods to catch the audience’s eye more quickly and create more interesting animations.

I was casually browsing the web today when I stumbled upon an animation blogger demonstrating how to make a transition animation where a pentagram is transformed into a character, which I found quite interesting.

The author first conceived a transformed form in the shape of a pentagram, then fused the girl’s image into the pentagram and drew the girl’s dynamics against the shape of the pentagram.

The movement is made to fit the shape of the pentagram as closely as possible. Keep contrasting the transformations.

The droplets of water waving in the girl’s hand grow larger and the girl’s form eventually liquefies into water.

The transition is perfect, with only eleven frames to achieve in a very smooth way. Well worth studying.

Recently a new animation was released in China – I Am What I Am – and I was intrigued by the opening: ink and water animation, which are quite a lot of animated transitions in just a minute and a half.

So I studied the rules of animation transitions in detail.

I separated these transitions into several categories: transformational push-pull-rotate, connected dynamics, and explosion transitions.

• Transformational push-pull-rotate have the advantage of adding storytelling to the narrative, most often through the eyes of the character into another story, and can be used for things like reminiscence and double identity transitions, which have a propulsive effect on the story.

• Connected dynamics can bring strong dramatic tension to animation, using the dynamics of what the characters are doing to seamlessly segue to the next scene, so smoothly that transitions are overlooked and add a montage effect to the film.

• Explosion transitions are very popular in short films, as the advantage of explosions is that they can quickly cover the entire frame for a switch, whether with flash, smoke or broken objects. For short opening credits or transitions, they can give the audience a quick and powerful sensory stimulus.

The teacher Steve used body language to express the way the animated character should speak, for example, the body should not always be moving when saying a sentence, but should follow the rhythm of the words and then move the body after the sentence.

At first, I didn’t really understand what the teacher said about lips animation, and I had no experience in this area, I just knew to change the two poses according to the sound, so I spent a day drawing the following mouth animation.

Yes, it was awful, the whole animation looked very strange and stiff, I started to think about what went wrong, firstly I think I drew a very complicated head, which made it very difficult to animate the whole thing, there was so much movement in the hair part that I just wanted to give up as soon as I started the middle frames.

The facial muscles didn’t follow the shape of the mouth at all, which meant that the facial contours didn’t follow the expressions, making the image very stiff.

Steve’s advice to me after seeing my animation was not to start with a clean sheet, but to sketch with the pencil tool and draw more lines on each line, which was very helpful. I used to waste a lot of time trying to get a perfect line, which made it difficult to add intermediate frames, but I applied Steve’s method to my subsequent animation drawings and found that I drew faster and could draw more at the same time than before.

So I picked up the brush again and started a new version, this time I simplified the character and added the body, also the speech rhythm, I put more thought into the expressions, I wanted to exaggerate the expressions of the character and added a lot of intermediate frames, each frame was not repeated, I cleared all the frames and redraw them.

I found that the result was much more vivid and interesting, there were so many more frames than in the first draft of the animation and the movements were more consistent.

This was a little exercise for a storyboard class. I think because of the time I didn’t express too clearly the emotions of the story reversal and the surprise of the characters, I could have added some body movements to show the surprise, used darker tones of light and shadow to show the mystery of the man so that the audience didn’t know where the man was, and finally a big plot reversal. But all in all this little animation exercise was great fun! It allowed me to draw a quick and clear version of the story and I will be practising more in the future.

Over the last few weeks, we have been introduced to AE animation and learnt how to use Duik for animated skeleton binding.

I was very intrigued by the reference given by the teacher in the class and I was so impressed by the effects of AE animation that I went online to learn more about how some of the AE animators do the skeleton binding of the characters and create the effects.

This animator-Duduf mentioned that she used the plug-in Duik in AE in order to make the flat characters move.

She had to separate each part that had to move in the animation: cut the hands, the toes, the legs in two parts, separate the eyes from the face to be able to move them, etc. That was the first step in this work, a lot of organization and drawing in Photoshop.

And for the expressions, she had to draw a library of expressions, for the eyes, the eyebrows, the mouth…

And she even drew three head shapes, to adapt the shape depending on the mouth displayed.

After watching animator Duduf’s work, I decided to practice skeleton binding with Duik on my own.

I started by drawing a puppy in Adobe Illustrator and wanted to simulate a short AE walking animation. Here is what the puppy looks like:

And I split the puppy’s limbs into paws, lower limbs and upper limbs, and the body part was broken down into three layers: top, middle and bottom.

Made a short animal walking and running action.

But I wasn’t very satisfied with the dynamics of the walk, a lot of parts were through the mould which I didn’t expect and I spent a lot of time adjusting it.

I thought it might be because the dog’s joints were too small, so I recreated a new rabbit character using Adobe Illustrator with the same operation to try to adjust it to a better display, but this time I added the eyes and other expressions, and added some of the water animation effects I learned in An class.

The movements feel a little more fluid, but the rhythm is still not quite right. I think I will pay more attention to the rhythm in the next project and improve it.

Looking back at my sketching work, I found that there was always a lot of uncertainty in the lines drawn on the spot and the shape of the figure was not well grasped, but on the contrary, the dynamics of the figure were much clearer and the lines were more certain when drawn on the computer.

The two beans method mentioned by the teacher was perfect for quickly capturing the dynamics of the figure. Once the lower crotch was identified, the rest of the figure was much easier to draw, and attention should be paid to the thickness of the lines, as the closer the figure is, the clearer it can be described, while the distant ones can be sketched in a few strokes.

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.