SM4709 Internship and Practicum

My last task is to make an overall color script for the whole movie. Though I have made some for a few scenes, I found it difficult to make a flow and consistency between them when combining the tiny scripts together. It was probably because all scenes were done at a different time separately, there were no tight connections between scenes. It turned out difficulty. It took times for me to step back, look at the whole picture of the film and make another color script for the whole film. I learned from this mistake that I should do everything from a whole picture first and work on the details afterward. Otherwise, things may mess up and do not have a connection.

These two weeks, I was working on the character color design. I fell in a struggle that how much should the character stick to the reality. We are told to make the animation believable so the audience can have empathy and follow the story. Yet, there are many reasons that creators may need to break the boundary and add some imagination, such as to need to attract attention and using different colors to let audience recognize different characters. It is quite difficult to find the balance. Therefore, I found some reference for myself to learn how others deal with this issue. Ojarumaru image from the Internet. In Ojarumaru, there are many firefly characters but they have a different color for the body. People can recognize different characters and genders with colors but it does not depend on the real firefly color, except the wings and tails. This is a clever way to combine imaginative and real color choice together. I was trying to apply this to my desi...

To apply for the character license, we need to assign the colours for all characters within these two weeks. There are some groups of characters with same tone. It was quite difficult to handle the colours as I need to take the balance between using the same colour tone and can let audience recognize the characters are different at once. It made me think of the film Poko, which contains a lot of raccoon dogs but the colour designers handled the colour of each raccoon well. Therefore, I tried to observe and find the mean to finish the task. The film Pom Poko. Image from the Internet.

To produce products for the animation, pantone is used for colour design. However, I am not that familiar with printing and pantone colour. There are so many types of pantone colours, like coated and uncoate CMYK. Once I used the wrong piles of pantone colour, it cost me more time I need to re-assign the colous using another pile. It was time-consuming to repeat the same task but I learnt a lesson from it.

For these two weeks, director and I tried to deal with the colour direction for other scenes. Things getting better as I started developing a logic for the film that I could handle the design in a faster way, except more time was needed to experiment the blending colour for different shots. Apart from the official work, we discussed the animated feature film Isle of Dogs and went to the sharing of Tim Allen organised by UA Cinema. Our company also organised a sharing about stop-motion animation with the animators from UK and HK. I went there and I learnt some interesting experience from the guest. Image from the event FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/903927209803374/ Although the guests did not talk about the colour aspects a lot, they talked about the details and how they communicated with directors during the production. It was easy to make beautiful animation but it was difficult to communicate with your colleagues. There are different styles and way that we ne...

Apart from the colour correction for scenes, we also need to tune the material library made from Background Department. Material library is a newly addded production way to reduce workload of Background Department. After making the library for common object, like trees and flowers, painters only need to grab the materials needed and put into the background, just like chopping a stamp.  It is a bit similar to the limited animation used in Japanese industry. Japanese animators use method like using tricks to animate fewer frames in order to generate a large amount of animation within a short period of production time. Examples like the animation Devilman Crybaby and animes in Kyoto Animation. Image from the Internet There are pros and cons for limited animation and full animation. However, for the long-term feature production in Asia, limited animation is more common and suitable due to the finance and time given.