When we first came up with this theme, we went through a lot of tearing down and rebuilding. Because the film is only 20 seconds long, we have been thinking about what kind of story can be presented in just 20 seconds. We first deleted some words that were not used, and then we each chose five words from the remaining words and made up three stories. After we wrote the story, we found an interesting coincidence that we both chose the word ocean. So we chose my story Starlight as the initial script and started the preliminary research. The starlight story was chosen because we were both most interested in the sea because it was so fascinating. In fact, I also like several other stories I wrote, which are a little bit romantic and a little bit dreamy fairy tales.
Starlight’s original story goes that dolphins catch meteors that fall in the sea and drop them on the seafloor’s starlight path, which lights the way home for small fish. At first I thought we were going to show the final story in the traditional animation way, and we quickly sorted out the tasks. I did the set design and YOURONG did the character design, but in between they helped each other with their work. We found a lot of pictures of the seabed, starry sky, luminous jellyfish and so on, and we watched a lot of documentaries about the seabed creatures, we wanted to present a dream and very personalized underwater world and bright stars. After I drew the first draft storyboard, I didn’t realize that YOURONG and I had different ideas. YOURONG modified some of my storyboards. The general direction remains the same, but the ending of the story becomes more reasonable after constant collision of ideas. Since YOURONG and I have very different painting styles, in the early stage when I said that I wanted to depict the scene in a very illustrative style, the illustrations in our imagination were completely different. After I drew the finished product, YOURONG made a lot of modifications, so the run-in of the early painting style was also a small difficulty we needed to overcome in the whole production process. But now that I think about it, the running-in of styles is inevitable. If there are other group cooperation projects next time, this running-in process should still be very interesting.
Reworking the same painting can make the work extremely dynamic. Each person would find and add little details that the other had missed or missed. I love this magical way of creating, which has completely opened up a new world for me. For the post-production sound, I made the background sound with a bowl of water, my bracelet, and two silver cups. Then YOURONG and I wanted the sound to be more rich, so we added marimba and vibraphone sounds, and used simple notes to represent the dynamic sound of entering and leaving the water.
We designed a lot of scenes and jellyfish, but we didn’t use them in the final product, which was a shame.
The following pictures and videos are all our preliminary research:
In fact, this project is my first complete group cooperation in a real sense. Story from the beginning to the discussion of the creation of the early concept design to the later, the entire creative process are the two of us together supplement each other, I have you the sometimes-complex mix-and-match cooperation, and is not a simple we completed their part, are not in a very fragmented way to finish writing this is the most let me glad.
I think there are some things that can be avoided and paid attention to in the next group project. In fact, we can give each other more space to keep their work. Like one thousand readers have one thousand Hamlet, everyone imagine pictures and present work is different, not because the other person’s creation does not conform to your imagination go to deny each other’s work, also can’t because don’t think the other side of the picture have their desired effect and completely delete each other’s work and repaint the work yourself. I think the better way to deal with it is to communicate well and revise the work together. In this way, the final effect of the work can truly reflect the cooperation of both parties, rather than always accommodating one person’s idea.
My stories that we didn’t pick up:
Forests, turtles, poison, wings, love
A turtle lived in a swamp deep in a forest and fell in love with a white swan flying over his head. The tortoise knew how ugly he was. He could not fly, and there was always an insurmountable barrier between him and his love. The tortoise went to ask the satyr to give him a poison so that it could grow wings and become a bird. The satyr-god gave it to the turtle, and the turtle drank it quickly. It became a bird, and it flew to its love happily. Bang, a shot rang out, and the turtle turned into a bird was killed by a hunter.
Mountains, forests, moon, love, love letters
The mountain and the moon fell in love, but they were far apart. The mountain let the forest trees on its body grow hard. Finally one day the trees grew tall enough to touch the moon! At the top of the tree, a leaf grows, and there is a love picture on the leaf. The mountain sent this love letter to the moon.
YOURONG‘s stories that we didn’t pick up:
The protagonist lives on the mountain, the temperature rises, the mountain melts, the sea rises and he drowns
mountain froest egg fly wings
There was a forest in the mountains, there was a strange creature in the forest, it was a pair of wings it had no body, the birds in the forest would run away when they saw it, one day it found a crumbling egg, the wings flew over to protect it but it did not have a lot of strength, it and the egg both fell to the ground, the egg broke out of it a wingless bird, the two of them snapped together into a complete bird.
star fly wings dophin mountain
The little monk found the stars in the main hall, and the moment he touched the stars he turned into a winged dolphin, flying in the clouds and falling from the clouds, he found himself still in the main hall