As an artist I am passionate about being able to portray my own desired world of nonsense, enjoyment and playful scenes into reality, in hopes they will provoke your interest in perceiving the world through a different lens. My artworks are heavily inspired by the anime genre, which is known to be visually rich, and has the potential of bringing one’s imagination to life.
This Golden Lockdown project allowed me to explore new medias via digital animation, which worked hand-in-hand with the digital and hand-drawn aesthetic that the anime genre offers.
The video above is an edit of several animes (Japanese cartoons) composed into this one video, to hopefully help give you an insight to the anime art genre- visually and specifically the animation aspect.
Like any other artist, one needs inspiration in order to create a master piece. For this project, being directly influenced by The Golden record, I have chosen the moving images aspect and the theme of Journey. However, the way I interpreted it was unknown at that time, so I had to invest some time into research for inspiration. The following artists peaked my interest:
Cristobal Leon- Lucia (2007)
This is a small section of a stop motion animation film that includes a track of foley sounds and spoken word. What struck me was how well all of the stated elements worked together to form an uneasy and creepy atmosphere. This film managed to display a subtle yet clear theme of Journey by telling a story, and this interpretation of story telling is what I decided I wanted to do in my project.
Billboard display of 3D illusion in Hong Kong
I happened to be scrolling through instagram and found this short video displaying an optical illusion of coloured people seeming to escape the screen. In the moment of viewing this post, a clear idea of what I wanted to do for my project came to mind: the incorporation of something coming out of the screen. It was such an amusing yet unusual thing to occur. An idea like this intertwines well with my work flow of out-of-the-ordinary scenarios.
Anime inspired animation
The other main influence that I wanted to incorporate into my project was the anime genre of art. I was unsure of how I wanted to incorporate this genre until I came across the Lucia stop-motion animation, and brainstorming ideas for this “moving images” aspect. I came to conclusion that “moving images” reminds me of animation and since animation is a new media for me I wanted to really push my boundaries and try it.
Once thorough research and experimenting has been conducted, it’s quite important to organise my thoughts and produce a solid plan which can help guide me to creating my project as well as possible. Especially since this particular project consists of several aspects that I must think through carefully, such as the animating processes and angles I need to record myself for the whole idea to work. The image shown here is the timeline (plan) of how I wanted my video to turn out.
Once I had a plan of how I wanted to create my video project, I had to actually make the animations and perform the recordings necessary. Animating is a media that I haven’t tried before, this project was really fun as I discovered how to create these moving images, but also much difficult than I thought, it was a fun challenge and very rewarding in the end.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to add the bright vibrant colours that the anime genre is known for, since I’m still not at that level of animating skill yet. Nevertheless I was still proud of the outcome and managed to incorporate my fun and bubbly personality into it.
Bellow are the two animations I completed:
My animating software was only available for only 2 seconds worth of animation, so this animated section was too quick and in need of editing later to make it last longer.
Here I put a green screen background so I can eventually edit the animation and overlay it over some of my recordings, hopefully creating an illusion as if the animation comes out of my computer screen.
Once I’ve completed animating and recording the necessary videos, I had to edit and put together everything. I used an editing app on my phone called “capcut” which allowed me to do all the compiling and editing.
Golden Lockdown 