Three by Three Project (2×3)
Food and Bottle Project
Project Ideas from Yourong Gu and Mengchao Huang, they would like to produce an animation about a witch who loves cooking with magic and running a restaurant.
Moodboard
Early Design
Initial character design by Jia Wei and Yourong Gu
Improved character design by Jia Wei
Environment design by Mengchao Huang
Logline：This is the story about a young witch with insufficient magical ability who gains self-identity and unravels her heart by opening a restaurant in the human world and realising that magical ability doesn’t mean everything.
Synopsis: The main character of the story, our little witch, was bullied by the magical community because of her lack of magical ability, and on the day she turns 18, she leaves the community of magician alone and travels to the human world then open a restaurant to earn a living. When the Little Witch encounters the crisis of closing down her restaurant, she accidentally meets a dead customer who was a human chef in life, and by accepting the dead spirit’s commission and fulfilling its wish, the little witch also unravels the knot that magical ability doesn’t mean everything.
By Mengchao Huang
By Jia Wei
By Yuyang Zhao
Script by Yuyang Zhao
By Yourong Gu
Improved Concept
Logline: The Witch’s Restaurant is back in business and has become popular after welcoming a special customer, Ghost Chef.
Synopsis: The witch who cooks with magic opens a restaurant, but she can only make smelly food because she doesn’t know anything about cooking. One day, a ghost chef comes to the restaurant, and he needs the help of the witch’s magic to back home and reunite with his family. But the witch’s magic is not powerful for her to help the ghost chef. Accidentally, the witch’s magic food reacts with the ghost chef’s belongings, which is a photo with his family, opening the door to his home. At the same time, to appreciate the witch, the ghost chef gives her precious recipe book to the witch, which makes the food she cooks delicious and the restaurant becomes popular.
Character design and animation test by Jia Wei
Environment design by Yourong Gu
Beat Boards, Storyboard and animatic by Yuyang Zhao
Beat Boards
Animatic
Animatic with sound
Reflection
Evidence of personal role
In this project, my previous main role is editor assistant, which is to organize the story with Yourong Gu, who was our main editor and storyboard designer previously. There were too many different directions and versions of the story at first in our group, I also suggested lots of directions and then wrote a full script after we discussed and tried to help our group organized it much clearly. After a one-to-one tutorial with tutors and getting some feedback about our story, we improved it and had another version of our story, at this time, we adjusted our role assignment, and now I become the lead storyboard artist. I don’t write the script again because the storyboard is much clearer in visuals and draw storyboard directly, which is one of our tutor’s advice. I organized the tutor’s suggestions for our story and our initial concept, then produced the storyboard and made the animatic, however, because we took lots of time changing our stories in the previous time, at this stage, our animatic still needed to be improved and no sound now.
Critical appraisal with ‘Next steps’ proposals and intentions.
In the next step, we will improve the pacing of our animatic and shorten some content in order to make our story more clearer and understandable. In addition, we will add sound to our animatic so that the pace will be much easier to control. Also, when I produced our storyboard and animatic, our character and environment designer is still adjusting the characters and background, but it’s decided and clear now after our element 1 final presentation, thus, in the next step, I will transform our rough animatic into detailed version with clear character and background, also with color and some adjustments of composition, all of them would be more helpful for our audience to make sense of our storytelling. Meanwhile, we still need more proof of concept, especially the animation tests and we need to make sure our visual style as soon as possible.