Illustration and Visual Narrative - Project 2

30 Sept 2020 - 18 Oct 2020 (Week 7 - Week 9)

Yeo Hui Qi / 0334134 / B'CS

Illustration and Visual Narrative

Project 2 - Decisive Moment

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PROJECT 2

For project 2 we were required to portray a deciding moment in a movie or show in a short animated GIF. I picked a scene from my favourite anime Noragami. I chose between 2 scenes. The scene I chose is where the main protagonist is in a dire situation but meets a spirit that he employs to become his weapon and companion of sorts. He then uses this newly found "regalia" to defeat the evil spirit that was chasing him around. The scene itself has a great wow factor. You can refer to the scene from this YouTube link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYqOILyRRRs&t=490s . The timestamp for the scene I mentioned is from 7:20 to 8.30.

For my ideation process, I thought of Yukine, the spirit as a small light of hope in a dark moment. So that was the thing I wanted to portray.

Sketch:

In the sketch, you can see my idea to turn the small orb into a sword but after I realized that:

1. I don't know how to do that, and 

2. The sword I drew looks really awkward and too short in general.

So, when creating the animation frames, I just stuck with animating the orb and the eyes.

Figure 1.1 Project 2 Sketch

After sketching I went on with creating the still frame in Illustrator. I replicated the look of the monster from memory but couldn't quite get the hue right. I tried animating this but later realized it looked too flat. And I changed the aspect ration to the right one after checking the briefing document.

Figure 1.2 Digital Illustration (Version 1)

The way I animated the GIF is I made all the different frames in Illustrator. 10 frames in total if I remember correctly. The using those frames I went into Photoshop to create the timeline frame by frame. Since I learned this in Typography last semester, I was more familiar with this method. I believe using After Effects would have been more effective for this project but I had never used it before so I stuck to what I knew.

Figure 1.3 Animated GIF version 1

After this I added a gradient to the green skin of the monster and made the eyes glow animated. Below is my final submission for this project.

Figure 1.4 Final GIF

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REFLECTION

For this project I think my animation was quite simple yet it was symbolic of the moment portrayed in the clip. I personally chose to use Photoshop to make the GIF because I was more familiar with it. But after using After Effects in my Photography and Digital Imaging module, I realized that After Effects would've made the process of animating this project much easier.