SM4709 Internship and Practicum

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.

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!