Red

Thread SHARON LEE

FANI7010: Animation Production 15/16

Since I came alone from Taiwan to the UK for stud-ying, I realised the culture difference between two countries. For some reasons, I feel I should probably do something about Taiwanese culture. I started to think about what is our own culture. For some foreigners who lives in Taiwan feel Taiwanese don’t have very clear cultural features, and we are lack of being proud of our identities. Recently, more and more Taiwanese concern about our culture heritage preservation. Tai-wanese culture was influenced by Qing Dynasty, Japan, and western countries. My first idea was to do an ani-mated documentary which is talking about my grand-mother’s memory. She lived in a huge different timing from us. She lived across the era from Taiwan being a colony of Japan to Nationalist government. However, after doing more research of Taiwanese history, I found out my grandmother’s story is not enough to elaborate my idea clearly , so I decided to combined several local Taiwanese stories.

My purpose of this animated documentary is to re-cord our history and document the history in differ-ent medium—Animated Documentary. The goal of my film is that I hope Taiwanese would be willing to understand deeply of our own culture and be proud of being a Taiwanese. For foreigner, I hope they could understand more about what is Taiwan and have interest in Taiwanese history and culture.

Story

Development

During Qing Dynasty, opium was popular in Taiwan, but it was forbidden during Japanese colonial period.

During Japanese colonial period, Taiwanese wanted to become a truly Japanese to get more respect and better life quality. Therefore, Taiwan-ese pursued Japanese culture like changing outfit and hairstyle.

The following sketches are some stories I collected from books, interviews, and documentaries.

Japanese police held power to put down Taiwanese local work-ers and farmers.

After World War II, there were too many orphans who could not get enough food in orphanage. In one of the orphanage which was under National Revolutionary Army, people used one litre of milk to make steam breads to feed more children instead of drinking.

About 1950s to 1960s, Taiwan-ese started to admire American culture; western dancing was popular in social events.

Taiwanese was very disappoint-ed about the low administrative efficiency of Nationalist govern-ment; Taiwanese describe them as livestock.

During the war time, people used rice sacks as materials to make trousers.

Story

Development

For further research, I have read some books which were written during 1920s to 1970s. The books ‘Or-phan of Asia’ and ‘Potsdam Section Chief ’ were written by Wu, Zhuoliu, which inspired me to write my story. These two books inspired me to think about Taiwanese identity during different certain situations. I could see Taiwanese were struggling about being a Chinese, Japa-nese, Mainlander, Islander or pursuing western culture. For my story, I combined true stories and interviews I have collected and wrote it to a narrative story. I named my film as ‘Red Thread’; red thread is a metaphor throughout this film as a direction to guide the main character to find what is his identity. Red thread will only appear when the main character feel lost.

Orphan of Asia, Wu Zhuoliu, 1946 Potsdam Section Chief, 1948

Production

Colour Testing

Since I wanted to challenge myself to do traditional drawing animation on paper which I have not done it before, I decided to draw watercolour animation. The first result I felt it is too colourful and too bright for my film. Hence, I edited it to black and white in photoshop and composited it with black thread. However, I don’t want my film is only mono tone, so I also added some blue and red tones to make image looks more interest-ing. At the end, because I am doing black and white film, I decided to use Chinese ink to draw instead of watercolour.

Watercolour on paper

Colour Testing

Watercolour on paper, Photoshop

Watercolour on paper, Photoshop

Line Testing

At the first time, I didn’t count the frames correctly, and it didn’t look well. Therefore, I added some frames to make it smoother and adjusted speed in After effects. Besides. I have made a list of every shots to check how much work I have to finish.

Shot9- 1 Shot9- 2 Shot9- 3

Shot9- 4 Shot9- 5 Shot9- 6

Shot9- 7 Shot9- 8 (Extra) Shot9- 9 (Extra)

Shot9- 10 (Extra)

Shot8- 1

Shot8- 2 Shot8- 3 Shot8- 4

Shot8- 5

Shot8- 8

Shot8- 11 (Extra)

Shot8- 6

Shot8- 9 (Extra)

Shot8- 12 (Extra)

Shot8- 7

Shot8- 10 (Extra)

Shot8- 13 (Extra)

Shot List

Shot List - 1

Shot List - 2

Shot List -3

Embroidery

It was my first time to use sewing machine and I didn’t know how to do free-motion embroidery, so I spent some time on testing sewing machine. After several practices, I could handle sewing machine pretty well now and I quite happy with the result.

Shot8- 1

Shot7- 2

Shot8- 2

Shot8- 5

Shot8- 3

Shot8- 7

Shot8- 1 Shot8- 2

Shot7- 2

Shot7- 7

Shot7- 5

Shot7- 9

Shot14

Stop motion

I have to point out that I spent most of my time on mod-ifying this shot which is about Chinese and Japanese word characters mixing together. I tried to sew frame by frame at the first time, but it didn’t work well. Therefore, I decided to simply use thread stop-motion which I think it looks better.

Sewing frame by frame

Stop-motion

Stop motion

Frame 001

Frame 063

Frame 063

Frame 063

Frame 063

Storyboard

Animatic

When I finished my story, I assumed it will be 7 minutes long; fortunately, after I did my animatic, it’s 5 minutes. I did not have that much concern about my length when I did my first animatic. However, due to the progress I have only done 1 minutes and 10 seconds which does not reach the goal I planed it. I planed to finished 2 minutes good quality animation before 9th of May. Therefore, I have to find some way to make sure I could finish my film on time. I have already decided to reduce some of my thread work instead of cutting my film short. I plan to finish all my watercolour drawing and compositing first and then if I have time I will add some black thread outline on some watercolour drawing to give different texture feeling. Due to the huge amount of time I spent on embroidery stitch-es, I will only do some red thread stitch for some important shots and reduce the amount of work of black thread.

For voice over, aside from some interviews I did by myself, I have also collaborated with a national organisation called ‘Story Taiwan.’ They collect local Taiwanese stories and also encourage people to up-load their own stories for documenting our history. I found quite a few suitable local stories could work with my film. However, it was not that easy to get people’s agreement to put their voices on my film. I have received several rejection, which means I have to find other stories that could work well with my film. Luckily, after several tries, I have already received some people’s agreement. Besides, I am also trying to collaborate with a documentary film which I am still contacting about the authorisation.

From Vida’s opinion, she suggested me to rearrange some voice over be-cause there are some conflicts between images and voices. I agree with her opinion I also feel some part of voices do not match my animation images. Besides, since I received some rejection, I do have to change some voices. For my next step, I will rearrange my voice over first and keep working on animation production. Overall, I think I was too ambitious for creating such a complicated film. I will make my film simpler to focus more on my watercolour drawing and reduce the thread work.

001 002

003

005

004

006

007 008

009

011

013

010

012

014

015 016

017

019

021

018

020

022

023 024

025

027

029

026

028

030

031 032

033

035

037

034

036

038

039 040

041

043

045

042

044

046

047 048

049

051

053

050

052

054

055 056

057

059

061

058

060

062

063 064

065

067

069

066

068

070

071 072

073

075

077

074

076

078

079 080

081

083

085

082

084

086

SHARON LEEUCA FARNHAM 2016