SM4709 Internship and Practicum

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.

These days, I was doing colour tune for the concept arts and finalized background pieces. Blending Mode in Adobe Photoshop is so convenience and I love using it during my own production. However, director found the effects applied were not suitable for the style and theme our film opts for. The effect looks okay but problem occurs when it matches with the story. She gave me some instruction and we tried to figure out how the blending mode exactly working so I can use the effects wisely next time. After studying the guideline from Adobe Help Center (Web:  Blending Mode in Adobe ), I learnt how the blending mode is calculated and generated on different colours. This is the first time I studied the colour in a mathematical way. It seems a little bit silly but I can work faster and apply the mode instantly.

There is a book called アニメーションの色職人 which was purchased by the project manager recently. It is about the working experience and life of 保田道世. This book only has Japanese version. I cannot read Japanese so Google Translate helped me a lot on translation. I was amazed by the details 保田道世 did for the films of Studio Ghibli. For examples, she took care of the lightness changes of human eyeball in the dark. She had a high standard on the colour design in different time, temperature and environment. She also knew well how the colour palette works when two colors go together.  It taught me a good lesson and I wish it has Chinese version published later.

Still working on the colour direction this week.  I showed the rough colour direction to director. There were somethings I did not know about the story and needed to modify the guideline.  There are so much to learn to connect colours with story. Since there is no exact answer that which colour is more suitable for the film, it requires me to read more and explore more in order to make my own colour palette and decision for the animated film. I need more self-exploration.

This week, I try to make colour direction for one of the scenes. Taking reference from other artists, I made the emotional graph to help myself finding the colours suitable for the scene. Before doing that, there are too many colours in the world that I could not do the decision. It was much easier to handle and get the whole picture of that scene after I did the analyse and graphs. Research and doing more pre-production really help a lot!

This week I can have chance to take a closer look at the animation production pipeline. Even I worked on my independent animation, I did not realize so many different roles involved. Colleagues in the company are professional and finish the task well so they can have good collaboration with others. Colour Department involves in all the 3 parts in whole animation production: pre-production, production and post-production. In pre-production, we need to design the colour direction for background department to follow. For instances, how greenery the trees are and how the seasons affect the environment change. After the background department completes their works, we need to fine tune the colour and check if the colour direction requires changes. After compositing animation and still background together, we also need to do colour correction and make sure the characters have the consistent colour. It sounds like some trivial jobs and can be done easily. However, when I really execute...

In order to find out how other color artists do their works in other animation company, I read many reference book this week and try to grab the tricks behind color design. The following book is one of the reference I took from my studio. It introduces the color palette the colour designers used for different environment. For example, the combination colour of red and green is used for the situation in danger. I will try to digest the experience other people have and apply the colour representation in the future.