Week 16 of Production for the 1080 Studios, oh boy oh boy.
Our deadline is getting close and i am freaking out!!! So much stuff to do. The assignments for the other classes are also due next week, and I’m only 3/4 way done with them. But with the bad comes the good as well. I finished one class module, so now i have slightly more time to work the animation for CPD! Oh yas! And since the assignment for the other classes are coming due soon, that would mean that the modules are coming to their end soon and our schedules would be even more cleared for us to work on the production even more!
YAYYYYYYYYYY (kinda cos we still have to do work but at least we don’t have to juggle 5 modules at the same time).
This week, i didn’t really work too much on the animation, i gotta be honest. I know! I feel a bit guilty, but i had to place priority on other classes a little bit first. But i still did a little bit of work, and that is the eye animation for the second scene of the animation!
It was a quick animation, just some simple frames and it was good to go, though Dana had to change the shape of the eye cos it didn’t really match with the original design of the character. I just followed what i drew in the storyboard. Then i also coloured and edited the new animation in the animatic! Which you can check out on our studio blog at https://1080studios.tumblr.com/ .
I am really hoping we are to finish this animation quickly, maybe a few days before the deadline so we don’t have to fret too much about submitting an incomplete animation, with missing colours or animations. That would be a nightmare.
Anyways, this is your Captain logging off and i’ll tell you more about what happens in the next week! Bye bye!!!
Week 15 of Production. I believe it’s production stage at this point, right?
Week 15 is just the same as any other week to be honest. School work, animation keyframing, sweating and panicking over the workload, etc. This week i managed to finish the arm stretching animation that i was working on last week.
It was really weird to work on this animation because the action for this scene is a bit….unique? Not saying people don’t stretch their arms in real life, but it is hard to find an exact video of a boy stretching with the camera facing in front of him. So i had to record myself doing this action and also sometimes, i would move my arms and analyse where my arm would be or how my body would move, and draw according to that.
I then also coloured and edited more stuff for the animation and added them into the animatic, as a form of updating it. I feel like i’m working really slow, but at the same time, i also have two more assignments due on the same week two weeks from now, so i’m panicking a little bit. Oh gosh.
But judging from our teacher’s reaction, our work pace seems to be…okay? i can’t really tell to be honest.
Anyways this is your captain logging off. Have a safe flight and take care!
Week 14 is over really quickly and as per usual, i feel that i did work but also no work at all.
This week i focused on colouring the cleanups from the previous animations i have done, animating a new shot and sending it to the cleanup artist, and also editing the new animation into the animatic! Here is the updated version of the animatic / animation!
The colouring process for the title card was a little troublesome, because during the colouring, my ToonBoom Harmony kept crashing and refused to work, and i still had the shading to complete. So i uploaded the file as a zip to the studio’s shared folder, so Dana can complete the shading in my place, while i figure out how to fix the Harmony issue.
Thankfully, i just had to download a newer version of the software and was good to go for the next cleanup. But Dana wanted to send me back the original file for that title card shot, because the frames for the boy’s skin were not in frame, apparently. I believe she accidentally shifted the frames and that caused everything to shift. I would have just worked on the original file that i uploaded, but she already completed shading for most parts of it, except for the skin, and she deleted the frames for majority of the skin. Which means i have to re-do the base colouring again *cries*
Nonetheless, i still managed to complete it in a day, thankfully, and i edited the completed title card into the animatic! So far, we are doing good but i wonder if we are able to finish the animation in time. A bit worried, not going to lie.
Anyways, this is your Captain signing out for this week. See ya!
Week 10 of Pre-production. It’s actually almost the end of term break, but to be honest, didn’t really felt like we had a break. Sure, the workload has halt for a moment but there are still stuff to work on. Well, for me, I had to work on animation tests for the film.
I accidentally spent too much time on 3 seconds of an animation, until my team mate told me that I didn’t need to do all those extra tasks. So I spent one week just working on one small part down below.
Me dumb dumb. But then I had to speed and draw the keyframes and in-betweens for the next few seconds which resulted in this.
Currently, the line art and clean up I left it to Dana to work on since she has a cleaner line art for her drawings and animation. I am more of a rough sketcher so for me to have clean lines is…….tough. I am gonna say tough cos I can do clean lineart but it will take 100% of my brain power, so I rather no risk it.
So for now, this is what I did over two weeks, including extra assignments that I had to work on. And currently sourcing for internships too. Hot damn, being an adult is hard.
Anyways, this is your Captain signing off. Back to school next week so, good luck to me.
For Digital Post-production, I was tasked to create a music video using only stock footage / archive footage. I chose to work on one of my favourite songs – Flammable and Explosive ‘易燃易爆炸’ by Hua Chenyu 华晨宇. The song could only be 3 minutes long at max and 2 minutes at the very least.
Finding footage was a huge difficulty considering the musicality and concept behind the song. I really wanted to capture the raw emotions you can feel through the song itself, so to ensure that my music video makes sense and also adds as a visual enhancer for the song, that was hard. That was a challenge.
But through trials and tribulations, I finally managed to complete the project.
Here, I present you, Flammable and Explosive, the Unofficial MV by Xuan Lee.
I sincerely hope I can get a high grade from this, I’m really proud of it!
For our final assignment for Drawing Foundation, we had to draw a three-point perspective cityscape of our own imagination. Let’s talk about that.
-Good Mythical Morning intro-
Let’s start off by explaining the assignment that was given to us. Firstly, we had to come up with 5 thumbnails that will help to guide us for our assignment, which is to be drawn on an A3 drawing block (A HUGE MEDIUM FOR ME). Sounds pretty simple, right? Come up with 5 thumbnails with original ideas so that life is easier for you. Well, let’s just say that’s the part where I struggled the most. I could not think of any ideas that is interesting and true to myself and would also impress the teachers, so I spent a ton of pages on my sketchbook just doing thumbnails. I used around 6 pages of paper, solely for the sake of thumbnails.
Now, how did I solve the problem, I hear you say?
One day, while thinking of said issue, I was watching one of my favourite K-Drama, Hwayugi or A Korean Odyessey. And as I was observing the surroundings in the show, I remembered in the first episode, there was the Marble Mountains. The place where Son O Gong (Monkey King) was being detained and locked in.
Hwayugi, 2018
And the interior strikes me as interesting, moody yet calming. At this point, I had an epiphany.
I will do a cityscape based on this!
The theme will be enlightenment and the path to nirvana. And there I started my journey to create a meaningful artwork that would satisfy not only myself, but also my teachers.
Final Thumbnail by Giraffe
So after many attempts (3 actually), I finally came up with this. My teacher did say, “Please shift your house to the left side and move your buddha statue to the front so it would give a more dynamic composition.’ And I’m like EEEEEEEEEEEE.
But I did, of course, listen to her when I started working on my final draft.
So after hours and hours and hours of shading, drawing, banging my head on the table, we finally have this. And oh lord I’m so proud of it!
The Flowing City by Xuan Lee, 2019
Here is my rationale for my art piece.
The cityscape is inspired by Eckhart Tolle’s teachings and a building and interior designs from the show ‘Hwayugi’. The city is located inside a giant cave with a waterfall. The reason why the city is in the cave, it is everything that is formed in caves are natural and formed without resistance ; flowing along the path of life. People should not resist and deny their path of fate and accept whatever that is coming their way. They should flow and grow like water, and allow themselves to be a part of the universe.
This place is a city of solace and repose. A city of enlightenment and purpose. It is meant for those seeking for peace and another reality to escape their problems and bring themselves back to their inner purpose.
So far, the comments that the teachers gave me wasn’t that bad. There is definitely room for improvement (since this is my first time drawing a cityscape at such a large scale), but overall, I am very proud of what I did. Yes, I had to make some changes to the original idea (like replacing the Buddha statue with a giant Bonsai tree and shifting the waterfall to the middle).
Let’s pray that I have an A+ for this module!!!! I hope you learn something new from here! ❤
Hey guys! This is an assignment that I did for my Design Principles module, and it took a lot of goddamn time for me to complete it. Not because I didn’t finish it in time but I had to edit it so many times!
Let’s get started with this.
So our assignment has to do with negative space. Since I missed the first half of the lesson, I didn’t really know what was going on and what the definition of said word means. Thus, I had to experiment with a lot of ideas and drafts.
I wanted to channel some sort of message that resonates in society. Because just the previous night, one of my good friends was having a tough time and I wanted to echo her voice into my art. Thus I experimented with deeper and darker themes such as sadness and depression.
And after much deliberation and some rejection I thought of this anime character — Kanonzaka Doppo from Hypnosis Microphone, who is a salesman and has depression and suicidal tendencies.
And I had this idea of replacing his tie with a noose, symbolising how strenuous and choking the job is and how it stresses employees out to the brink of death. Thus came the first draft.
This can be found on my ig: @concretegiraffs (plugging in my brand whenever I can XD)
And. my teacher rejected it saying it was not considered negative space and since it is a white collared job, I should change the suit to white so I was like, ‘Okay. That’s going to take a lot of time but alright, I’ll do it for the GPA.’
And thus came the second one.
And thus I showed my teacher again for feedback, but still it is not what he asked for. So I let out a sigh, and tried again.
And again.
And again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
And finally, my teacher sent back a ‘okay’. and I threw my arms in the air, feeling exhausted as heck and tired.
The final result is so different from the first iteration and thank god I finished it in time. I just hope to God that I get an A+ for this because I put in SOOOOOO much effort and time for this, for some reason, like why did I do this to myself? Oh well, all I can do to ensure an A+ is to pay my teacher money…LOL JOKES HEHE (jk jk)
After around 4.5 gruelling hours of drawing, sketching, shading and crying, I finally finished my building.
You can see how Nier: Automata heavily influenced this artwork. HAHAHA I love that game to death. Thank you, Yoko Taro and Square Enix!
A short writeup/backstory of this piece:
In the future, after the corruption of government and advancement of technology has reached its peak, a group of rebels created their own group to try to escape the manipulation and control of the government. They made their own mini-village, residing in a tree structure / tree house. They became a part of nature, going back to how humanity and life used to be. Life seems to be comfortable and they are able to lead a happy and free life.
However, after some time, due to old age, the crown of tree starts to chip off layers, which is very unusual and unnatural. The crown revealed a rusty metallic surface in a shape of a chimney. The real truth is that the whole time the rebels were still living under the government’s control and they have been spying on them for years through the hollow passages within the ‘tree’, observing their every moves and controlling them unconsciously.
The rebels then learned that no matter where they go, they will never be able to escape from the authorities, and that they will never be free.
nier : automata by Yoko Taro and Square Enix
Yeah, kinda came up with it on the spot though. But I tried to relate it to the story of Nier: Automata (the second Act). -no spoilers!-
I hope you like my ideation piece and I will see you guys again! Bye~
joobieboi 
