BA3a Personal Showcase: Modern Fable
Project Proposal Form
Name: Chloe Cameron-Hughes
Project Title: Yugen
Moral / Message: Balance
Animation Technique/s: 2D digital Animation/ After Effects compositing
Genre: Fantasy

Use this form to propose a well-constructed plan for your project.
Your project will naturally build and deviate on this initial plan, which you can comment on in your evaluation.
Outline the full scope of research sources to support your research and development.
e.g. books, films, magazines, podcasts, web resources. Be specific in your plan.
Also outline primary research activities.
My plan for this project is to primarily study existing images/photos/concept art of Japan, (tokyo mainly), apocalyptic scenes, abandoned places in the world, fantasy styled artwork based on the real world. I’m going to attempt to experiment with natural and organic plants and fungi to create a world in which nature has taken back control from humans and industrialisation. I will also look at concept work and in-animation art and backgrounds from Studio Ghibli’s ‘Nausicaa and the valley in the wind’ and ‘Princess Mononoke’ (specifically looking at how they’ve used colour). I want to get an understanding on how to create realistic trees, foliage, backgrounds and organic matter, so I will also look up photos of fungi, ‘nature claimed’ parts of the world and perhaps see what concept art comes up. For my characters I know I want to have a young Japanese girl to play my main protagonist which will mean looking up how pre-existing animations capture a youthful young child, looking at expressions/fashion and animation differences between children and adults. My two supporting characters being ‘the spirits of the earth’ are going to be of an ectoplasm like substance, so looking at how Studio Ghibli animates there gloopy and translucent characters such as ‘No face’ and the ‘Forest Spirit’ will be a key area of research. I plan to use youtube as a significant source of research when it comes to learning new techniques, compositing is something I’ve never truly explored or allowed myself to and I want to create a layered 3D effect within my fable animation. Also when it comes to making my backgrounds and capture a ‘realistic effect’ is something I will also need to look at tutorials for. For example looking at behind the scenes of anime such as ‘Your name’ and individual animators on youtube who create animations in a similar style.

Outline the specialist skills you wish to develop and how your narrative can allow you to develop these skills.
e.g. character animation, modelling/model making, character design.
My narrative is going to help push my skills in background design, colour and lighting due to the design ideas being inspired by works such as ‘Nausicaa and the valley of the wind’, ‘Your name’ and ‘Control Bear’. I’m going to be exploring how I can create detailed and beautiful backgrounds similar to what are displayed in the animations listed, and what skills this will require. I will need to develop my understanding on colour theory especially when it comes to creating my own backgrounds and understanding how to paint lighting with different colours. I’ll need to get to a competent level of background design in order to pull off the desired look I’m wanting to achieve within this project. My narrative is set in a post apocalyptic, beautiful, serenic and organic environment, these are scenes that I have always wanted to create and will want to continue creating throughout my career. Fantasy animations and narratives have always been my favourite and therefore in order to fully understand the different techniques needed to create my backgrounds I’m going to have to train myself within this area.

Outline the difficulties you foresee in the development of your project. Consider schedule, budget (Is there any cost?),
This will in turn affect the shape of your project.
Timing and finishing animations has always been a problem for me, I never seem to be able to come up with an ending that I’m happy with without wanting to go back and constantly change things throughout the story and scenes. I’m a very visual person, I can visualise the scenes and the camera angles before planning and considering how much effort it takes for each scene. I’m hoping that I’m able to plan my time properly and be able to create an animation that I’m happy with without being over-perfect to the point of lack of work.
What limitations have you considered in order to develop specialist skills.
e.g. scope of the narrative, limitations of assets, design (character, bg), number of shots.

I have never digitally painted backgrounds or truly explored colour theory in this way, I’m very excited to get into an area that I’ve always wanted to push my skill set in but I am aware that it may be harder than it first appears. I’m hoping that I will have enough time to develop my skills in this way, as well as learning how to composit in After Effects without the quality of the animation dropping.

Character design is crucial for creating the right type of character that works within the story you are wanting to tell. For example, if my character was heartless and mean to others, it wouldn’t work with the message and moral I’m trying to demonstrate across to my audience.

As I have already decided that my story will most likely take place in apocalyptic Japan. culturally I want my character to represent Young Japanese children, through physical attributes and clothing choices. I’ve also referenced one of my favourite Animation Studios, Studio Ghibli as I feel they capture a childlike charm within their younger characters that I would like to replicate.

I’ve decided style wise to also reference alot of popular and for me personally, beautiful and charming animations which have similar concepts within style and nature that would work well in my animation.

I’ve started to experiment with facial styles, figuring out how I can make my character appear young through the size of the head/cheeks/eyes and nose. Hairstyle is also important and I’m still to figure out how exactly I want her hair styled due to the environment shes living in.

How My Idea has progressed

My ideas since last week started to develop slightly over the weekend, I had played around with my characters aesthetics and began thinking and asking myself questions such as, why does she look like this? How has she been able to maintain her appearance on her own without an adults help? And this lead me to start changing the hairstyle from a rather neat looking bob to a half up and half down look I made this design choice as when it came to her hairstyle and the post-apocalyptic world she would be living in it didn’t make sense for it to resemble finely brushed hair. The half up and down look is mean’t to signify her past self, her past life where her mother may of styled her hair for her. By having half of it down and messy hopefully shows that she still holds onto her past self but is unable to fix her hair herself. So her mentality is one sides better than nothing.
I’ve been inspired my Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke as well. This is because for this term I decided that I wanted to base my dissertation on an animation style (in regards to design and concept) on a subject area/artists that I wish to create work similar too. In Princess Mononoke I loved the spirit creatures that lived and protected the forest. For me I would like to take an element of this especially the ectoplasm like substance which the forest spirit seemed to be made from and have it leaking and squelching out of cracks in the earth. I would like this to symbolize potentially the earths ‘spirit’ that has now been freed due to the destruction of technology, or perhaps because of the damage humans have inflicted on the planet. I want the ectoplasm to then start to turn into new creatures, keeping the same texture but shifting form and sprouting eyes. Almost like evolution has decided to start all over again.
After speaking with Jon about my plan and ideas, I felt a lot more confident in what I had managed to come up with so far. We both agreed that it had a clear message it was addressing which was ‘balance’ as I wished to display this through my young girl character being the one who is able to bring nature, humanity and technology together peacefully. Without the need to destroy one another. I plan to show technology in this animation through a marble like sphere which the young girl and creatures will stumble across. She will initially be wary before realising she recognises the object (this is because it will be an object from her past, (a futuristic common household appliance). She will form her own quick bond with this sphere, however the creatures are scared and the sphere doesn’t recognize them as anything that ‘should’ exist and retaliates aggressively. The little girl is horrified and quickly shows that there is no threat. The sphere calms down and she is able to form a small group of friends between them all.
I think my story has definitely come along quite nicely but I need to make sure I start putting together a storyboard so I can visually try and depict my animation, this will also allow me to see what clearly needs to be changed. Something else that I have learnt while sketching for this project is that I was sketching my character all wrong, in regards to making her appear young, At first I couldn’t figure out where I was going wrong, so I decided to look up reference images of children such as anatomy, young Japanese girls (as this is what my character is hopefully going to represent) and realised I had gone about the proportions all wrong. So I started to resketch my character but this time carefully studying my reference material and made sure that the face was a lot rounder and I guess ‘heavier weighted’ around the cheeks to represent a younger and more innocent character, this includes making the nose smaller and less defined and the eyes rounder. I’ve played around a little bit with her clothing but not as much as I would potentially of liked to quite yet, I’m definitely set on the hairstyle and the new way of drawing the proportioned faces, but clothes is something that is still being considered. I have done brief research into ‘Japans kids fashion’ as well as looking at Studio Ghibli’s ‘Ponyo’ and ‘Setsuko’ from Grave of the Fireflies as reference material and saw a correlation between my real life sources and the fashion from ‘GoTF’ which are these pyjama like comfy trouser bottoms which I thought would be something my character would likely wear.