SM4709 Internship and Practicum

Last week of my internship! Time to wrap up everything and organize the files. I did not know how messy my file management was until I packed things to leave. It was happy to work with my colleagues at Rooftop Animation. Though I was only a color design intern, I learned different things in the working environment. For examples, how to communicate with partners, how a production company functions and how to learn from the mistake. Thanks for everyone taking care of me and giving me a chance to learn :)!

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.