Unfinished Animation: ： Finnal Animatic (youtube.com)
Logline：This is a story that takes place in a witch’s restaurant, and it talks about the soul swap between the witch’s cat and the chef on TV.
Synopsis：A witch who owns a restaurant in order to make delicious food that can attract customers, while experimenting with the developing magic soup dishes, her failed works accidentally drunk by her pet cat, the cat and the chef on TV soul exchange. The witch and the Chef Cat try different soup recipes in order to find a way to exchange souls back, and in the end, when the witch and the Chef Cat argue, the Chef Cat accidentally drops into the soup pot with the correct ingredient bottle, allowing the souls to exchange back.
Target Audience : Child and teengers
props design
Animatic:
Statement of intent relating to personal role:
In the Element 2 period, my main role was to improve our animatic with Yourong, also I edited it in Premiere Pro until our animatic was ready for the next stage. Before putting our animatic into formal production, I helped Yourong improve our character design. In order to simplify our witch character, I found some Chinese ancient people as our research and used simple shapes to draw the little witch, also created the turnarounds. In the sound effect design, I found some free sources online and also recorded some sounds with human voices for acting the witch. In addition, I tried to use books and papers to simulate the sound of a cat flipping through the magic book and sliding down into pieces of “paper cat”. Other than these works, I spent plenty of time doing inbetweener’s work, cleaning up, and coloring work. According to our animatic, Pat improved people’s movement and body language with line drafts, then I cleaned up with clear lines, added inbetweens, and colored them.
Shot List
In order to put our character into formal production stage, I simplified our previous character design by Jia Wei (Sena) according to the simple shapes in Chinese Ancient drawings. However, these designs are too flat and graphic, to solve this problem, I paid more attention on designing the witch’s sleeves and created a turnaround view, and also put it into background to check if the style matches.
I found some oriental-style drawings and gestures from Buddhist illustrations as our reference, these special gestures are mysterious and suitable for our worldview of oriental magic. In our animation, we designed a hand gesture for the witch and gave a medium shot while she was cooking a new soup for the chef cat to show how she use her magic power.
At this stage, I spent lots of time doing these works every day. At first, I thought that this kind of work was boring, and it was my first time to use procreate dreams to animate, I was unfamiliar with it. However, I was surprised that I enjoyed these works as time went by, especially coloring them, it was healing for me!
During this journey, I could work more efficiently and draw the lines easily and smoothly, also, I learned more about character animation skills from my teammates.
Sound Design （unfinished）
Backgrounds Workflow
I sorted out the background we needed according to the different shots.
Critical Appraisal
Overall, from this final major project, I have learned a lot from teamwork. At first, we couldn’t communicate with each other very well, everyone had their own idea and didn’t want to compromise. Thus, I learned to listen more, and find a win-win way to collaborate each other. The most difficult part was producing our animatic, I tried my best to combined everyone’s idea in our story, however, because of too much information, it was unclear, like the status of our team. Then, I knew less is more, Yourong and I shortened our animatic, we cut the unnecessary shots, and clarify our plot again and again, during this process, I learned to design the shots effectively, use less shots to show more information.
In addition, there are also some animation skills I still need to improve, the timing and pacing are really important in an animation. At first, our pacing was flat, so we cut shots and speeded up some parts. However, we lost some important reaction at the same time, it was unclear of character’s acting movement. In the next stage, I will still edit our animatic and adjusted our timing and pacing, also, music is helpful for telling story, so I will finish our music design part first, at the same time, inbetween, clean up and coloring work will continue to finish them.
This project gave me challenges in some animation skills and teamwork style, but also a good chance for me to clarify my position in team and my interests.
Bibliography
Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) Directed by H. Miyazaki [Film]. Japan: Studio Ghibli
Mandala. M (2009) Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy: SHAANXI NORMAL UNIVERSITY GENERAL PUBLISHING HOUSE Co,Ltd.
Witch & Cat Reference illustrations (unknown) Available at: (138) Pinterest (Accessed: 25 April 2024)
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) Directed by I. Takahata [Film]. Japan: Studio Ghibli
The Nine-Colored Deer (1981) Directed by Q. Jiajun and D. Tielang [Film]. Chinese: Shanghai Animation Film Studio