This is where all my texts and un-used info hides from that pdf document. I will try to explain the frame choices, ideas behind my design and how I did everything I could to minimize the workload and still failed miserably of delivering the final video on time.

Characters

For the first time we made different color palletes of characters for different scenes. This speeds up the coloring process greatly as well as improving the cosistency among the team. It also solves the problem none of us know how to calibrate our monitors to make the colors look the same.

The cannon I designed was enormous. According to the original design, it was about half the size of London. A base of that size requires many, many people to maintain and run it. I couldn’t possibly draw everyone, so I chose to design characters with actual work positions representative of the aerospace field. Besides that, if you have multiple characters, the chemistry between those guys while you creating your content is amazing. Ideas of them interacting with each other and how they perform following their different personalities are one of the most intriguing moment of storytelling.

We used to have a scene of an oden party where everyone cheer for the night as the first thing in tomorrow’s morning is to launch the cannon.

Those interactions between people are the ‘lights’ in the darkness. Even though there’s radioactive storm brewing outside the base, they can still have one night of fun and sleep tight. What I was intented to express is these moments of light will help us go through dark times. In some ways, storytelling-wise, they are far important than the time travel itself.

Another important job for these characters are to give different camera angles. It took me a while of how to shoot the scene of firing the cannon. I place the ground control in a armor truck far away from the base so that I can set cameras there to shoot the blast smoke and shock waves created by the cannon. I also have several characters sitting inside of the base as mission controls. they are responsible of pushing forward the story and create tensions. If I don`t have characters both outside and inside, the change of camera will feel strange and unnatural.

There are also characters we was never used. He serves as the leader of the base and basically motivate the heroine. He also observe the whole action with audiences and I had some emotional lines for him to speak out what I want my audiences to feel. He is like a tool for me to hopefully lead my audiences’ feelings.

At this un-used scene, the engineer asks this old man what she’s looking at, the old man replies that he’s watching his daughter, the heroine. He plays the role of a father of a world-saving hero, but in his eyes the heroine will always be his daughter.

The heroine’s mother, on the other hand, serves as the key motivation of heroine, convincing her to take part in such dangerous mission. She is the key answer to ‘WHY’ doing this, which is also what audience will ask most frequently.

She was like a saint, she represents humanity, in its most ideal form. Always positive, brave never giving up, she is the character appears in fairy tales and the one adults told us to follow yet we never could.

In my story, she represents the moral reason of this time-travel operation, to save people. And her daughter’s reaction to that is more realistic and easier to understand by the audience as we are all just common folks. We can’t save the day even there is a chance.

Assets

The reason I have this section separate away from other part is that, there are too many machines, planes, non-humanoid form objects requires creative ideas. Also it’s because we are doing a science fiction animation, so the science part needs to be solid. That means seriously and SERIOUSLY taking references from reality.

I want to address at the very start that, I am a moron, I failed each and every math test in Grade 5, I have no idea how science works but I did my best. The bullet loading mechanism you see above is based on an actual artiliary called 2S7.

The inside look of the bullet is actually a mimic of nuclear submarine. so you can actually see the water tanks and hull structure at the front half of the bullet and I kind of snatched it to a rocket engine. I aslo take reference from actual rifle bullet and how they fill the bullet with gunpowder and other explosive matters.

The reason of taking reference from submarines is that both of them needs to undertake tremendous pressive, for submarine, it`s the water pressure, and for my bullet, it’s the air pressure casts on every inches of its surface when traveling in high speed.

When the bullet is in the air, it needs to acclerate for the second time as well as adjust route to harvest Earth’s gravity to reach light speed. The method I chose is called Armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot, or APFSDS in short, It is the technique widely used in modern anti-armor sabots and bullets that are able to acclerate for the second time once it’s outside the barrel.

Another object worth talking about is the plane. This is a near-futuristic design of helicopters meet seaplanes. My original idea of this is to be a comfortable ride for 2 people at least and a razer mining tool attached at its bottom, It’s not suppse to look fierce and tough like fighter jets or bombers, so I took reference from Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey.

The drawing on the right is a simplified version of the left one. As in animation it’s extremely pain to draw such complicated objects over and over again and I doubt no one in my team is qualified to do this. To furthermore ease the pain for my teammates, I made a 3D model of it.

With the help of 3D, I can finally produce a take off maneuver animation with it. I am still the only one willing to animate planes so that’s why I had to delete all cuts involving planes but hey, it’s really cool.

Everything involving this gun is so complicated. I thought I was the first person ever thinking of using a cannon to push people into space. Then I looked up and found out this:

Jules Verne, the father of science fiction, figured this out 200 years eariler than me. He wrote this book in 1865, talking about literally sending people to the moon by loading them into a giant bullet and shoot them out using a giant gun.

Did I copied his idea and took it as mine? No, it may seems like it but the reality is way brutal. I thought I finally come up something original and crazy enough to be my FMP project, and I found out that hundreds years ago people already did this. Can you imagine the disappointment, the setback I felt on that day.

Anyway, I read the novel and I think the gun desire more details, big is just not enough.

It’s not how normal engine ignites. This is how normal engine does it. Everything happens in just a heart-beat. To make it more dramatic I decided to add a little bit fiction to it.

There are also inside of the gun which I already discussed in previous myblog posts. Feel free to visit them as well.

The reason I made them ‘designs’ insteand of ‘backgrounds’ is that, I believe non-organic matters can also be characters and own characteristics just as good as humanoid characters. According to the settings of the whole animation, the gun was used as a weapon against foreign countries. It played its role at the war and destroyed the world. I took that and made its last job to fire a bullet not built to destruct but reverse time and undo everything. An aging war machine’s final duty is to bring peace and hope to mankind. That’s the deep message beneth the settings that I wish people can notice. That’s the romance I was talking about.

We used to have a scene where people stands up and salute at the heroine. All my characters comes from different cultural background and different country. That`s why their salutation pose are slightly different from each other. I took reference of American army, the UK army, Soviet Red army, Chinese PLA poses. I did this to show the idea of human combines their fate into one, they fight and unite together against the foe. Even though they wear army uniforms and the animation is about shooting people out of a gun, the core belief is and always is to have world peace.

Also, that plane at the very end is An-225. The biggest plane in the world and a true engineering miracle. The Russian on its forehead Мрія means Dreams. The last An-225 was destroyed during the Russo-Ukrainian War. I did this to honor the plane and hoping people could lift down hatred and become friends in the end.

The car those two characters were in, was CV33, I did that to pay my tribute to an anime series called Girls und Panzer. This anime emphasizes heavily on tanks as well as mine on guns.

Humans tend to input their feelings into non-organic objects like planes and warships as they often represent a country’s strength and will of power. This is the fundamental idea of my works and all other works involving warframe assets.

I want these assets to be as important as my characters as they also serve the indivisible part of this animation. All of them symbolize a certain message or serve a purpose in the animation. I really hope people could notice these but again, after month of re-editing and deleting, most of the ideas are gone.

Backgrounds

I did these for my music partner so that he could grasp the tone of music even better. Becasue of my lack of will most of the backgrounds are now just monochromatic lines. So these sketches now also serves a makeshift compensate and a rough plan of what my animation would look like in the end.

But still, I require nearly reallife-like backgrounds especially when involving mechanics and machines. I took references on real fighter jets control panels and learned the meaning of each dashboards. I have no idea why I did those and why I was so possessed on getting things realistic. As they may not perform as well as I thought they would be. But they do look pretty cool.

This is the only background I had colors on. The idea was to visually emphasize on the bullet and have it carved into audiences’ mind. I had grey and low-saturated color around the bullet and bright yellow for the bullet to make comparsion between each other. I don’t have time to explain everything like the old version. So I have to do such tiny little moves and pray that people would notice what I`m doing here.

Visual Effect

If there’s anything positive about this project, is that my take on handdrawn visual effect has significantly developped since last year. yet different from last year, this time I put my attention on environmental destructions with explosion clouds as embellishment.

Talking about rocks and explosions, there is one animator I have to bring up to the discussion. Nakamura Yutaka, a most talented Japanese animator specialized in visual effects and hand to hand combat. His unique style of using cubic blocks as fragments of nearby terrain is one of the most signiture scene in Japanese anime industry.

I make myself to learn from the best but I have my own twist. Instead of cubes, I use polygons.

What went well is that, polygons significantly creates better visuals IN STILL IMAGES. Most of my rocks move in very slow motion and doesn’t really create the pattern that indicates the shock wave. As in Nakamura’s frame, you can clear see there’s a circular shock wave impacts the ground causing all the cubes moves like a drop of water falls into a pool.

Another thing I noticed is that I tried to have different moving speed for rocks in different sizes, smaller ones move faster than the bigger ones, this actually creates a illusion of perspective I was not expect of.

There are also visual effects that I did not tested before. Some of them looks okay but others is just plain awkward. I figure we are going to fix that in the post production stage where we eradicate everything ugly.

The more I do those visual effect cuts, the more I realize that there are far more for me to learn. And the gap between me and masters doesn’t seem to narrow down. I do question myself the worth of hand draw all these effects. Some of them would be really easy to make in AE or using 3D effects. Am I on the right path?

Idea of this whole project and the idea of having these rocks scene comes from an Japanese anime movie called Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise。

This film was made in an era without any 3D support and AI inbetweens. It symbolizes the peak techinique of hand drawn animation in that age in Japan. And I mean real hardcore hand drawn, with real celluloid sheets, pencils and ink pens. There is one scene that is still worth admiring and watching at this day. The snowflakes.

Each and every piece of snowflakes has its own physics, perspectives and motion curve. You can easily put them back together into a whole piece. These scenes lasts for only seconds but require painstakingly hard labour.

This is how Japanese animators do in the old school way, generating those beautiful snowflakes like a machine.

And now we have computers that can do thousands of those things in one click. Am I stupid for still sticking to the old fasion way?

Narrative

In this section it’s all about my weird take on camera angles. The fundamental idea of this project is that, I need to have more shots close up to the heroine, 1st person view if possible, to maximize the immersive feeling for the audience. My story requires that as I am trying to send out the message. If the story is not strong enough, people will get confused and stuck at thinking why or what happend and ignore the message.

Well I will say with all that in mind I still didn’t deliver a story worth showing off. My study on storytelling is just not enough.

This is the first time the heorine shows her hand. She’s checking her gloves and blooming her hair. This scene doesn’t say much as individual but…

This is the second time she shows her hand in 1st person view. This is also the first time she attempts to interact with the light. Right now she’s in her cockpit, something is gonna happen yet audiences won’t know anything of it.

This is the last 1st person view. Different from before, she interacts with the light with engineer joining her.

The connection between those three scenes help me establish the connection between the concept of ‘light’ and our heroine. How she treats with the light and her surrondings indicates her emotion changes throughout the story. The light warms her at the third scene but blind her eyesight in the second. As the will of saving the world can be great when saying it out, yet extremely brutal and painful when actually doing it. Her hand on the other ‘hand’ puns intended, serves another purposes. Whether she lifts her arm up to touch the light or just simply want to block it, the intention behind the character is also something I hope my audience can think about. Wether to block the hope as it’s painful, or embrace it knowing there’s a rough journey ahead.

The idea may be fun to read but I think I executed it poorly. The whole scene just seems unnatural and it’s just awkward. I tried my best to make it less cheesy and corny but it’s still too much to learn. Maybe I need to hire a writer.

This is easily one of the most challenging cut in my animation. I struggled to find the perfect angle to film a scene about bullet out of a gun barrel. Here is another approach.

Both of the cameras follow the heroine and the bullet throughout the barrel, one in the inside and one at the outside. At some point I want to have both of these cuts remains and then I deleted it for repetitve information.

The vital information here is that, we are actually shooting people out of this gun. As this is not some common traveling method, people may get confused and question about what they just saw. I did this inside version of it so there’s a clear scene of the barrel, bullet moving inside of the barrel, and the girl inside the bullet. One cut to explain all.

At this point I want to address why I choose to use this painful way to do time travel and why it is vital and cannot be changed. As I said before, one of the idea of this animation is the heaviness of dream, hope and will to fight. That means I need to set up spme really tough tasks for the heroine to accomplish. So that there’s a feeling of winning something after some hard-working. I cannot draw some kind of portal or a button and characters just time travel in time with that ease. If the internal conflict of this animation is how heroine’s opinion shifts on hope and will, then this painful time travel plot is the external conflict that heroine must undertake to find the answer.

Massive objects moving around. These are some cuts worth talking about. The idea was not only to show the concept of these cool cranes and guns. A more important note is that, humans made all of this. The most important message hiding in my animation is the achievement of human civilization on this planet. When we are working on this project, there’s a lot of bad news going on around the globe. I did these cuts to kind of express my take on them as a whole. This will be a pretty sensitive topic and I hope I won’t anger anyone.

Despite of the war, slaughter, and starvation. I still believe that humans as a group, has achieved a lot since the stone age. If we throw away boundaries set by politics and economy, there are much to be cheered for. I want to believe in humanity and no matter what we are doing now, the future will always be bright. In the animation, the world is destroyed because of a world war. Yet my characters stand up again and again to bring back their lives and save the world. No matter how hard we fail, we stand up as a whole. This is not only a message to individual, but to humans as a whole.

Instead of choosing to do a common nature generally recover the wasteland scene for the time trave part, I choose to use the citylight of human civilization to indicate that time has gone back. I dim the light of all other stars in the universe, as I want to show that the light of mankind is brighter than any stars.

I want to praise humans, I want to say that if we want to, there are nothing impossible for us.

Top to bottom:

10 cylinder engine for the whole gun base. I took the same design Russians do on their tanks

Gas pump connects the left side, transmitting fuel and water to the engine

Shaft transimitting dynamic forces generated from the engine to the wheels of the gun base (not shown on this graph)

Water main control room is modified by the civilians to send water to their shelters.

Heat disspensor is modified by the civilians to harvest the heat to boil the water for civil use and water the crops on the right hand side. This is the warmest place inside the base, this is also where that hot pot scene takes place.

The main cable transmits power from the power station

The Fan was used to cool down the base. Now it`s stopped becasue people need heat more than ever. That is why there are so many steam comes down from the upper floors.

Waste water goes down to the power plant to recycle.

Tokamak is one of the most promising approach to a sustainable, profitable nuclear fusion power plant. In real life we have not achieve this clean energy breakthrough, yet in our story they somehow did it before 2020s.

It is a very very advancing technology as it basically provides unlimited power. We are thinking to change it to something more primitive, like a traditional nuclear power station or a geothermal power plant.

We did this to show you that some decision we made looks like we just use real life objects as a SF assets. It is not true at all. We go deep into settings and almost obssessed with useless details. Our newly ideas for this projects is to design a group of advanced civil engineering equipments for the gun base. As the equipments we use nowadays is unable to support such great structure plans.

We even started to seriously think what is a more scientifical way of ground breaking visual effects style that we are going to use:

We believe to build a grounded world, such details is needed and is way more attractive than orally speak out the settings. Those settings are not as powerful as the gun or the cloth our character are wearing, but they create an unnoticing feeling for audiences and overall they perform in a deeper way.

And it`s fun. I mean, a rocket powered crane, how cool is that.

There`s more coming in the future. We plan to do a full design on the bullet(protagonist’s shuttle) designs of background characters and more.

Why we put the plane together with the characters? Because animators need to perform everything like an actor/actress. There is certain ways to show a happy person, there is also a certain way to show how a plane fly. We treat our little plane the same as our characters. It serves a lot.

Most of the big artiliary has an issue of unable to ignite all propell fuel at the same time, causing great loss onf propell power. Schwewer Gustav, world’s biggest artiliary has this issue, causing it has far less power than it was designed to have.

Leo`s storyworld is based on magic.There’s no actual settings of where the magic comes from and it is almost a war crime to combine a SF world with a magic one.

So we changed his idea from a magical flying bird to a landkruzer.

Only this one does not run on lands, it runs on Ice clouds. Like Leo`s storyworld, we divided the world to two part.

We had two storylines, each for our parts in this project, and we designed the ending to have both side involved. I wrote it down as it`s a very easy thing to do but it`s not. We sat at the table, we ate chips and we spent about 4 afternoons trying to figure out how to make the story goes well with both of us involved. Here’s the meeting record of our ideas.

Sadly, we met setbacks, suggestions, mainly forcused on our length of the animation. Two storyline requires at least 10 minutes of animation to juts barely tell the story right. So we had to delete Leo`s idea one by one until one day I asked him, is it okay to remove all of his ideas.

I know what you feels, I also think it`s not fair for him to do so. I asked him several times about these decisions, he is always the generous one, saying that as long as our characters and animation look cool enough, he won`t complain a thing.

We kept his two worlds idea, and we will shatter the ice layer at the very end, kind of what he want for his story to ends.

This is a part of our storyboard that is supposed to be our prologue. We have a detailed world setting and we want to show it to others. These four scenes shows starvation, natural disasters and more wars. if you read our storyboard in my another post, you’ll see there are far more scenes about the story and its settings.

We followed the school’s advice to choose only the essence of the story, so here comes these three:

I would like to tell the story in detail here:

First part: The girl was drilling ice with an engineer. It is a daily job for them to get water supply for the whole colony. The girl convinced the engineer to allow her into this ‘saving the world’ project.

Second part: The girl finds out that she actually needs to do a time travel to save the whole world. She then starts training and preparing for the trip. This is the most important part of the story as she understands what hero is here for, what she`s actually saving. The term ‘world’ no longer being a vague concept or a title on a world map, but a very precise group of person she loves and willing to protect.

Third part: All traning and preparing is nothing if you don`t do it real. The girl starts the time jump and certainly the plan fails and she’s about to die. She then understand what it actually cost to be a hero, the fear of losing life, the burden of duty on her shoulders. She understands the idea of heroism and finally did the ultimate sacrifice.

This is the journey of her mental development of accepting and becoming a hero. We want to make sure that our audience can follow up her decisions as being a hero and save others is not a normal thoughts in common folks. That is why we choose to elimate the information gap between the audiences and our protagonist. They receive the amount of information at the same speed, they ask questions and get answered at the same time as our protagonist. So that hopefully audiences can find the decisions protagonist made reasonable as they stands on the same side facing the problem. There`s only a very thin paper between asking too much and calling it duty for heroism.

If you watched the animatics before, You may wonder what`s the role of protagonist’s mother in this plot. She is what we called a ‘pioneer’. She died a couple of years before becasue of the time travel plan failed. We designed her to be the hero our girl is trying to become and understand. we want to make this connection to be known but weak. A invisible bond between her and her mother that somehow leads herself to the same track.

She will be giving the answers to our question and she is the one who gives the message of our story.

1, Value the trip itself instead of valueing the final outcome.

2, Family and friends support in the back support us to do great works

3, No matter how much it takes, laugh at setbacks and get through it.

We want these messages to show up not only at the final part but also throughout the whole story, instead of merely saying it but showing it through protagonist’s life.

Let`s hope that can be done.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XOdown20MKeOCOAQN5VMzpt6Lq00vpQm/view?usp=sharing

This link above contains a storyboard. If you could kindly download it, it would help all of us. If you don`t want to waste your 10MB on your PC, here is a very blury version of it.

This storyboard will gets to become a real animation. Because of the constant setbacks from my teammate and from the school. That is, unhelpful comments and suggestions to the plot of the event, most of them demands to rewrite everything. Constant and discouraging questions about my abilities of finishing this projects on time. Demanding to have one`s own input in the TEAMwork yet does not accept any orders from the director.

I tried to be nice for 4 weeks and I find myself keep throwing away my brightest ideas for this project. During the making of my last two project (Explorary practice and personal project, GSMD project), I followed school`s advice and delete most of my work in the middle of making. These decisions impacted extremely heavily on the time planning of the entire production process, often requiring me to stay up late to catch up with the site in the final weeks to redo the deleted sections to the school’s input. It is a reasonable and common stage of any creative making process yet I reject to do it for the third times. It is not only me cannot handle the change such dramatic and tired, but also I cannot do this to my teammate, eradicating all of their hardwork and ask them to redo another. I have no problem sitting in front of my computer doing animation for a whole week straight not walking out from my dorm, I cannot ask others to follow as they have their own life.

So I spent 4 weeks doing nothing, but luckily we get rid of the trouble and now we are working very hard to cover up the 4 weeks losses.

I mean, we spent only 2 weeks to make a 7 minutes animatics. Just imagine what we can do if we have a full 6 weeks from the start.

There is a very big difference between hardcore SF, soft SF and space opera.

Soft SF, is based more on the story than the science part, it doesn`t need too much realistic scientific support as hardcore SF.

Hardcore SF, compare to soft SF, values the science very much. It has to be very scientific and realistic that it`s almost believeable enough to make people trying it in real life. That is the reason why some directors uses suggestions from scientists and professors when making SF movies.

And space opera is just traditional opera stories but changing horses to space ships.

Sci-fi has many authors who categorise their work as science fiction stories because of its wide audience and because it fits into the context of today’s readers who are rapidly advancing in technology. However many of them lack a realistic and believable scientific background. This is not to say that their work is inferior or boring, however the sci-fi that we seek is more focused on real and valid scientific settings that make people realise that these designs are actually achievable in reality. We need that sense of realism, and a sense of recognition from those involved in science when they see our animations.

Are we doing a hardcore SF animation? I can hardly answer that now because there are very high standards we need to achieve to be categorized as a hardcore SF genre. But it is certainly our goal to make it as realistic as possible.

That is why me as the director has to be very concise and careful about what we are going to draw. I cannot afford a real scientist to help us to solve a time machine problem so I have to learn a lots of things about the ‘technical’ part of this project.

We had a timeline for our world settings, we carefully designed the dates and time of the events so it makes sense and realistic.

I made a pdf talking about merely the background settings.

If you read those you’ll notice that I mentioned the aspect ‘no atomsphere’ in the settings. One of the result of taking away atomsphere is that all aircrafts that we use in real life won`t work as they are powered by the lift force.

Without air pressure there are no aerodynamics anywhere on earth. So we have to design a whole bunch of aircrafts for our characters to use. You may notice that some of them looks like our space shuttle in real life and others uses mere rocket engines. We designed this ‘rocket culture’ for our world becasue well, traditional planes won`t work.

I wrote an article about the gun base and how it should looks like at the very early stage. I did it so my teammates may have a better understanding of what we are doing. Here are some of it:

Ver.5 in the making…

The idea comes from my own preference for armoury mechanisms and the radical, simple, consequence-free solutions that humans have taken to solving problems in the last century. In more detail, this form of thinking comes from the design philosophy of World War II military ordnance. Before the invention of the targeted high-speed missile, the evaluation of the armed forces of each country was almost always “the bigger the better”.

Japan built the largest battleship in history, the Yamato, which was so large that it was called a hotel on the sea, with several kitchens and air-conditioning systems, and so luxurious that it did not look like a ship for war. Britain designed the Tortoise heavy assault tank, which was too big and thick to have enough speed to be used on a real battlefield. The United States built the B-29 Superfortress, the largest bomber in the world at the time. The worldview I designed continues this design philosophy and exaggerates it to the extreme.

Ordnance armaments were city-sized and capable of destroying a country in a single blow. You may question why this outdated, wasteful, and ridiculous design philosophy and history is continued in my work, but it is because mankind is always repeating its own mistakes, and it is because this philosophy led to the destruction of human civilisation in my story.

There are numerous films and animations using this style even way before the WW2. This idea was known as BDO (Big dumb objects) among science fiction lovers, It is used to describe any mysterious object, usually unknown origin and has immense power, in a story which generates an intense sense of wonder by its mere existence.

The idea is more liberal than the one above, it doesn’t touch on some of the more sensitive topics of today’s world, but rather aims to do the best it can in terms of graphics and design. This project is designed to simply explore the beauty and limits of 2D animation, with no storytelling requirements.

The idea came from my love of action films. My project last year was about an action scene, and I think I’ve progressed so much in this area of design that it’s time to make another one to prove my progress.

You can find all moving images appear in my PDF here. I have numbers written in bold italic on moving image`s description in the pdf. They match up to the images in this page.

There are also pictures and tests that I didn`t put on my PDF but still worth showing.

G1

G2

G3

G4

Some background sketches and explosion trials.

Full animation here.: