Exercise 1 - Portrait photo

Although this exercise only require us to draw, it inspire me different forms of “myself” in regular grid, irregular grid and curve lines, bringing the concepts of media and digital art. I thought of the concept of resolution during this practice, lower resolution/ clarity/ pixels brought different effects.

1.        Body movement – creation of short animation ( 60 frames )

lessons

We designed a movement referring to baby shark, and I am the dancer. The motion is captured into images, the capture software allow us to create animations based on the body movement images, the motion in animated outcome will be more smooth as we can refer to the skeleton. timing, pacing, and rhythm is crucial in creating fluid movement. This practice inspire me that movement adds excitement, vividness and overall compositional interest to an artwork.

We also required to include visual rhythm and music in the animation. With this approach, a sense of flow and connection within a work of art could be created. Music visualization using TouchDesign allow us to explore and visualize the rhythm in an audio, corporate with the body movement as we could not see the rhythm of an audio by our naked eye. If soundtrack in absent in animation, the evocation of emotions will be reduced. Style, volume, and tolerance are also vital considerations of a soundtrack. The application of technology enhance the overall quality of a work.

Our design in short animation is inspired by the portrait photos, we tried to pixelized it and explore how to enhance this approach.

Originally, we decide to illustrate the story of baby shark. However, as we would like to have pixelization, we decided to design a “game”, like the style of Super Mario.

The opening and closing motion of hands inspire us about beating monsters, we develop our idea from this inspiration

Final design:

Our animation illustrated a process of a BU student beating and defeating assignment monster (computer-like) and F-grade monster, symbolize our life as a HKBU student. The main character finally get A grades ( coins dropping ) in her assignments and exams, because she is able to deal with the challenges. We would like to emphasize the defeating process to show a university student done their homework. Rather than music, we edit different soundtrack to corporate with the actions in the game.

Work division:

Main Character design, soundtrack: Wong Kam Sze

Background design, Frame 53 – 60: Kong Cheuk Ting

Frame 1 – 19, 37 – 45: Wong Ka Lai

Frame 20 – 36, 46 – 52: Ho Man Wing

Reflections:

We should apply more frames to show what happen after winning, highlight the outcomes of victory.