Exploratory Practice-Critical Appraisal

In this project, I chose to work on a personal project. I created a story about on the planet of dandelions, two seeds that originated from the dandelions grew into human and frog respectively. Out of jealousy, the human and the frog had a dispute. This led to the barrenness of the land and the two seeds were about to perish. I wanted to convey to the audience that one should not destroy the environment due to personal desires. Throughout the entire project process, I received inspiration at every stage.

During the early creative stage of the project, first of all, in terms of character creation, initially the characters I designed only took into account their functions in the story. For example, based on my personal experience, I had a memory of encountering child abuse of frogs when I was young. So, for the characters representing animals in the story, I chose frog, while for human, I chose the image of a child.

During the first tutorial session with Su-Lynn, she pointed out that the design of the human character was not sufficient to showcase its distinct features. Therefore, I redesigned the shape of the character’s eyes, changing the originally soft pupils to sharp triangular shapes to represent the sharp personality of the character.

During the second tutorial session with Hannah, she suggested that I needed to add the same elements to these two characters to show their relationship. So, I chose yellow as the main color for these two characters because dandelions are yellow during their blooming period. At the same time, I also designed the same shape of blush for them. I think these two design adjustments can better highlight their relationship.

Secondly, I made a total of three revisions in the storyboard design. One point worth mentioning is that since this was a personal project, there were no team members to provide feedback to each other. So, Wendy and I organized a small meeting once or twice a week to report our progress and show each other what we had done for the story. This was of great help to me. I could put aside my subjective perspective and view my project from the other person’s perspective, which allowed me to better improve my project.

In the first storyboard, the human character were jealous of the frog’s flowers being larger and better than their own, so he went to argue with the frog and trampled on the frog’s flowers. The behavior of arguing and trampling on the flowers led to the disappearance of the dandelions. However, in the feedback from the first presentation, I learned that the reasons for the humans’ jealousy of the frog and the reasons for the disappearance of the human, the frog, and the dandelions were not clear. At the same time, in Hannah’s tutorial, Hannah suggested that the ending plot needed some modifications. The human character needed a character arc, and in the face of the disappearance of themselves, the frog, and the dandelions, the human should have a feedback or transformation.

In the second storyboard, to highlight the reason for the human’s jealousy, I added butterflies to the frog’s flowers to show that the frog’s flowers were better than the human’s. At the same time, to design a point that could trigger the human’s jealousy and anger to burst out, I made the frog character eat the flies surrounding the flowers. The humans were angry because they thought the frog could eat the flies, so he argued with the frog. And in the end, I added an action of the human trying to lift up the flowers to remedy the situation to show the character’s transformation. In the second project presentation, the feedback I received was that the emotional expression of the human character was very rich, but the emotional expression of the frog was very little.

In the final version of the storyboard, at the beginning, I added two shots of the characters looking at each other to show their initial harmonious relationship. Then, I changed the human character’s action of trampling on the frog’s flowers to the human character picking the flowers on the frog’s head, which could show both the human’s anger and the frog’s expression. When the human picked the flowers on the frog’s head, both their hands and those of the frog gradually became transparent. The human realized this and stopped the action, looking at the flowers in the frog’s garden. The flowers on the frog’s head and those in the garden all withered. This symbolizes a certain connection between them.

Finally, in the texture text, I initially attempted to create a Proof of Concept about the beginning scene of dandelions. This attempt was well-received by many students, but there was also a problem that if the animation was fully colored with the combined watercolor and colored pencil materials, it might take a lot of time. So I tried to directly color it using the paint bucket tool in Toonboom while using Procreate for the background. However, the result was not satisfactory. I thought the character and the background were not well-matched. Therefore, I chose to use the coloring method of Procreate that leans more towards watercolor and colored pencil materials. At the same time, I drew the draft of each frame using Toonboom.

In the later stage of this project, I gained a lot from the audio and the final adjustments. Firstly, in the audio aspect, I learned how to use recording equipment in class, so I recorded some sounds of clothes rubbing and the voice of a character expressing dissatisfaction and added them to the animation. Secondly, in the final project adjustments, I received feedback in the third presentation that the disappearance of the two characters was not obvious, and the meaning expressed by the withered dandelions in the final ending was not clear. However, since there were only a few days until the submission of the assignment, I didn’t have time to make changes to the final ending, so I only adjusted the opacity of the scenes where the two characters disappeared to make their disappearance more obvious.

Overall, first of all, in the early stage of the project, when creating the characters, I learned that one should not only focus on the design of the role’s function in the story but also pay attention to the connection between the two characters. I think I did a good job in improving the characters. Secondly, in the story design aspect, I think I did a good job in adjusting the character’s attitude changes in the plot. Finally, in the adjustment of storyboards and final animation effects, I effectively adjusted most of the plots and shot designs. In the l ending, the logic of the animation’s ending shot and the previous scenes cannot be connected, which is still an issue I haven’t solved. In the next project, I will pay more attention to time control and the logic and connection between animation shot designs.