Yanbin Wang

After a whole spring break I finally decided to write another progress report.

More like, if I don`t do it I`ll have no idea what to tell during my interim so… Let`s get started.

Before you watch this, pls notice that the sound effect I used here is definitly not the final ones and most of them will be replaced once the music is complete.

That is my animatics which lasts 4 minutes and 11 seconds. It is way over the length that we were suppose to do but I only got less a minute to talk so I`m gonna skip this part.

This is certainly not the final version of my animation`s key frames. I`m still working on some of them to make sure everyone can understand the story. I also made a very short clip to give you an idea of what the whole animation would be like:

But it`s still not the final output. You can still see some of the lightsources is twitching behind the monster and there`s some glitch on the background part but anyway!

It takes time to finish this whole thing so my primary work here is maybe to delete some of the unnecessary parts and to cut my video to a reasonable length.

I `ll have to say good bye to my cut off animation technique because it`s just not as good as I expect. I did this two model to maybe use it in some distant shots but i don`t think I`ll use it in major shots.

About the length problem. I actually made a worksheet to track my progress. It`s mainly made for myself to check so there`s a lot of chinese. sorry for that.

So the left part is my cuts or clips of my animation and the right side is my progress I finished most of my works in about 3 weeks. so I think I have a little bit of chance to pull this one off. I found a coworker on music and other stuff so all I need to do now is to clean up some of the mess, draw a lot of backgrounds.

I thinks it is possible.

Hey it`s me again.

It`s one day before the first interim and I think it`s time to have my first blog about this exciting project.

Exciting, but risky.

I have a complete storyline in my head, and I did drewthem down in a really sketchy style storyboard. And most certainly I won`t tell you guys the whole story from tip to toe. It would be too long and too boring.

So I made a very short version.:

1- This is my character.

2- She lives in this tiny house alone by herself

3-One day a giant robot shows up.

4-And the robot destroys the house.

5-And they end up in a fight.

That`s my main storyline. But don`t get me wrong I had detailed story about everything all in the storyboard here. Including where did the robot come from, what is inside that robot, where did the character come from and all that background story junk. The animation would be mainly about the character fighting the robot. It`s a little bit hard to tell but it`s mainly actions and character animation on the storyboard.

I did some tests and made some animatics alone the way. Trying to see if the storyboard actually works well with the animation. Here is one example. It is the first shot of the robot and it`s about to step on the house. I want to emphasis on how big it is so I put the hut here so you can see the contract. I typed test frames here because I actually did made an animation test for the robot.

It`s a pre-production test and I don`t really expect myself to actually use it. So the quality is a little bit off. Still, I hope you can see how I emphasised the weight of each parts of the robot. The momentum and all. I started drawing this robot when I was in First year. This here is a distant shot of the same design I did one year ago.

You can see it`s moving in a really slow speed. Because one year before I have no idea how to animate robots in such big scale and details. it`s always really hard to animate highly detained objects. And that makes this robot one of the biggest difficulties in this project.

And one year later although I am able to do the animation, I still want more details so I found a new way to animate those kind of thing. I made the robot in different parts and then assembled them as one. And then I animate each of them to make the whole robot move.

And here `s the test result.

Immediately you can see it`s completely different from hand drawn animation. In my opinion, right now it`s not as good as the traditional one but the strength of this one is that. As all those separated parts didn` change, I can color then and redraw them in great details and I don`t need to do it agian and again like traditional animation. If I can make all these motion graphics right, I believe it would be really amazing.

And I can used it in different scenarios. I can tell it to walk or jump, no need to draw more frames.

But still, there are things that have to be done traditionally. Like small fragments falling down from the main body, The dust and air beneth it and make the parts far away transparent. My ultimate goal is to use both of them together and combine the pros from both sides.

And besides the robot. Here`s also some sketches about the character. I took varies references from action movies to make sure I don`t make a close – up combat to some kind of magic duels.

I have never drawn any kinds of combat animation before, and that`s precisely why I am going to do it. And to see if I`m capable of drawing such things, I had another test with the character and her weapon. So she`s using her gravity and the elasticity of the stick to give a heavy blow on whatever I `m gonna put on the ground. I took the reference from this guy doing a martial art show. I broke more physics laws than he did so the animation may look a little bit more dramatic but it`s more powerful.

So all of these things is trying to tell you that I understand that the whole idea of this is to let us find a balance bewteen our personal projects and the professional practice. And my presentation shows a really ambitious project with little possibilities to succeed. I guess that`s all animators` issues that we don`t really know our limits until we find one. When I started preparing this presentation I also thought it would be impossible to make every imagination to come true. But while doing it I can gradually see how these fragments come together. I see the potential of this projects and I see the potential of the animation I made here. I can definetly go further with these. That is why I proposed such big plan.

I hope I won`t regret after a few weeks actually doing it. I really hope I won`t.

Anyway that`s enough for one entry. signing off.

Well as the title said, we have reached the very end of this project.

Everything i did before has been allowed to keep developing to the next stage. It is not final output but it is close. Close enough for me to write this final report of what I am going to do in the next few days and some reflections.

So one of the feedbacks I received from the last interim was to have more animation. That I can do, as the video I gave was just animatics, there are a bunch of inbetweens and coloring to do so it is possible and in my schedual to add more clips into it.

And that is bascially what i will do. Sounds pretty basic but it takes time. I said that it would be better after some weeks during the interim, I spoke these words directly to my clients and now i am really regret and doubt about if I can really make these things right.

I really hope I can.

As the project progressed, some thoughts became clearer. I really don’t seem to be following the standard process. I skipped the character design step and still don’t have a single three-view character sheet. Even in the final touches, the animation is still being drastically changed. The finished draft is now completely different from the first attempt.

This is the freedom that comes from the fact that I am doing all the drawing myself.
The project can be changed directly from my own ideas.
However, that also means the quality of the project completely depends on the extent of my ideas. Is the message that I want to express too childish, too serious, too big or too small…
whether the choice of expression is not flamboyant, whether it is fancy, whether it puts the cart before the horse…
And if I meet a partner who needs to communicate, will I be able to express myself and follow or let them follow my ideas?
Of course as an art student or an animator, I got lots of skill problems on my hands. Body ratios, human anatomy .etc.
But as an art supervisor and a director, what I have learnt this semester is that I have a lack of spirit, experience and imagination.
How to control myself and stay within the limits of what is required
How to find the most effective ways to solve problems and suggestions for improvement,
Most importantly, how to evolve my imagination and thinking to the next level,
For now these questions would be enough for me to meditate before sleep.
Even if I don’t know what the future holds, the least I can do now is to look at my work and never be sure of myself until I’ve reached the dead line.

I am grateful , despite all those negative words above, to all those experinece and paths I have made so far. It has been quite a journey and I did accomplished something.

And hopefully I can walk further on the path of animation from now on.

I am back at the end of first week after the winter break.

So what did I do during this fasinating winter?

Not much, actually. I had to change most of my designs becasue I got some serious feedback during the previous interim. I wrote a quick note after the interim:

Well it`s no big deal afterall. All I need is just delete what I did for the last three month and start over.

And then the third interim is coming and I need to assemble a video that`s promising enough to let people know i didn`t just sleep over the whole winter.

And I GOT NOTHING.

Well not exactly nothing but some scraps and trash I did. Still, I need to have a script of what the hell I `m going to say during the meeting so, here it is:

It is quite clear that this time we have two part of the video, each part is talking about one topic, which is: Define intersectional Discrinimation and Share the importance of allyship.

Which eventually talks about one thing:

and that is the topic of the whole animation:

So if you still remeber what I gave you guys last time, you will notice some major changes.

I wrote a quick note after the second interim which records the feedbacks i received. To fulfill most of them I have to change basically everything. So you could say I made a whole new animation between the second and third interim.

The point of this animation is to make a difference between worlds with and without allyship.

I actually did a lot version of this background. But the whole point of this is to break down the wall, to show the vast sky and open ground, to make a feeling of you can breathe freely and there is no bond or restriction, you can really feel that you can do everything.

And to make more connection with guildhall, I actually took reference from your riverbank building and put it in the background.

It`s not really obvious but I hope you can get the point, Still pls don`t think these two as the actual sketch of your school, but a spirtual image of the school`s impression.

I understand you guys may expect to see a more complete-stage animation at the final interim, but as I said before I have to restart over to meet the topics. and for animation part I work alone so there`s not much time for me to show you guys what this would be like when it`s nearly down.

Most of you probably have noticed that the music itself is also work in prgress. I actually edited the music myself with the excellent tracks provided by my guildhall coworker. I asked him to make a new one but as you know we had a voice record last week and to fit with the sound and graphic, my coworker just doesn`t have time to give me the track before today.

And for this project I have made 6 major changes so far and each time I had to redraw a lot of frames. it takes time but I assure to you this will be better and I will make this to a better stage before the final deadline.

So pls give us time, and we can make it better. That is all I have for you today. Thanks.

Several updates and since the second interim is near. I am gonna make this post as a draft of what I `m going to say during the interim. Just like what I did for my first post.

The time is short, and I think it`s boring to just listen to me talking. So I am just gonna show my animatics here:

…I Know this won`t work. Why did I bother trying.

So anyway, I hope people can understand what this is talking about and the message I `m trying to deliver here.

Which is:

If you can recall from the first interim. my animatics looked like this. It`s about a lady being ignored during a meeting in her company. I changed that to a more abstract symbolism which lets this lady to climb a high tower in a void.

Because being ignored is just to common, it may not contain enough impact, no matter visually or on story telling. I thought climbing a tower may give a more direct message, to show that this lady is in trouble, she needs help and she is lonely.

I changed almost all of my first part, some of them might look visually appealling but on communication-wise, it`s not really efficient.

There are some other changes I made. consequences of no allyship are now presented by animation instead of photos.

The scene of zooming out the city changes from one simple picture to a more complex camera movement. It`s not finished yet, but I hope you can understand the clip here.

The part of showing that guildhall has the power to change it. Initially it`s just a logo, Now it looks more complex and I made a actual hall from my imagination.

So what am I going to do in the future?

The next step is to enhance all my frames, add inbetweens and hopefully adding colour to my animation.

I am now currently working on some enhancement like this:

I`m changing the whole animation to make it more more wild I guess.

To show the discrimination is consuming this lady and it`s dangerous.

In the meantime, I took valuable advice from my tutor and included a clip of the woman looking up, smiling, and moving forward in the final section. I wanted to imply that the situation had changed in this way, also by bringing the character back kinds of echoing back and forth and hopefully make the whole animation more logical.

Structually.
Later she will join the crowd and the colours represented by the crowd will slowly change and the lady’s colours will also change, so she doesn’t change the crowd but the whole collective.

This section is not yet finished because the music production at the time did not take this into account.

I wrote a script and am going to send it to my voice actor so that part is also going on.

And that is pretty much all of my presentation. Thanks for my guildhall parter for his excellent music track.

Any questions?

It`s been a long time. I was working on the visual essay so not much to report.

The interim 2 is two weeks ahead. So I made a to do list to clean my head.

• Guildhall background enhancements
• London City zoom out key frame
• Other background enhancements
• Character animation enhancements
• New scene: woman`s heand go up and see changes
• New scene: people walking
• New scene: overtime+robbery+slum rainy and windy
• Sound acting
• Inbetweens
• Coloring

I got the background finished. I asked my friend from Game Arts to help me do the shading reference. and from that I produces some quite interesing backgrounds.

Work flow from the last report.

And about the zoom scene. I went there and found out that belfast was in a bad position geographically. It`s hard to put it in the scene.

As you can see there is few photos that can actually be used as reference for the zoom scene but I still got something out:

Will make it better.

On the new animation part. I showed my animatics to my mentors and they gave me some nice feedbacks.

To make the whole video more fluent and connected. I need to bring back the female character at the end and let her know that things can be changed. That`s the second background palette for. A wamer guildhall to hint audiences that something is better.

Well that`s the effect I wish to add. And I did this as part of the “bring back” plan.

She is urprised that the environment has changed, and smiles later and run towards the future. I am thinking to let her run slower and with more weight. So that it could be more natural.

That`s it for now. Hope I can do more work in the next two weeks.

Some major updates:

I finally started drawing this project. I had a clear storyboard in the first week and I thought this is going to be a piece of cake but……

Well I have to delete 75% of my previous works because they are not really “video material”

I mean they look good in a presentation, but in a video, not that much.

So what did I change?

If you cal recall, my video starts with a lady walking to her table and is about to give a speech to her fellow collegues. Now the lady will not speak to a room of men, but a vast space full of darkness and void. And she`s doing her speech on a tower:

Yeah they are rough sketches but I think it will provide more impact to the audience.

Because being ignored by people during a meeting is just so common. I want my audience to pay more attention on days and days of microaggression and pressure that `ll just tip tip tip till she go pop. And the speech, well, the speech is to show she trys to communicate with outside but because of different kinds of discrimination she just can`t keep going.

So what`s the best way to show that this lady is in pain? I tried to draw she shouts and hits the table and doing normal angry people would do. but in a animation way.

And she gets tired and starts to breathe heavily while she realizes all of these is not working.

This frame comes from my partner, he thought that close up shots of eyes and faces could increase the impact of the video, make it unforgetable, or as he said “make it disturbing”

And some shots of the tower to show how lonely she is during that time

I have to delete the part we “break” her and check out how many kinds of discrimination she might recieves for the length limits. I also changed the last part of how guildhall logo appears. it will not be just a logo, instead it will gradually become a hall of guildhall.

The building is not real. I imagined it from the experience when I visited guildhall for the first meeting.

I made all this into a video, and sent it to my partner to let him start working. I receive no reply from him till now, Hope he`s not giving up on me because the video is too bad.

Future plans:

I`m going to improve every frame in this video and try to make it 1:30 long. And two major improvement is on the scheduel:

I am going to change the hall of guildhall (?) from that to this:

That is just a sketch. I `m planning to finish the drawing in next week.

And i am thinking of a more visual-appealing way to show how complex london is.

Now what I have is a real simple zoom-out shot. I am thinking of adding a few camera turns.

How am I gonna do that, How will it look like, I still don`t know. But it will include some shots of HSM Belfast because I want to.

and the shard is near the ship.

I will go visit Belfast during the weekends, get some photos and try to figure out my camera movements.

That is all. I am leaving heavy works for the future me. I hope I won`t complain too much in report #4.

Week 2 I did little.

I finished the report and everyone said nice. I received no suggestions.

And that is where I am now worry about. I am going to have the second interim and if they are not satisfied with what I would have by now, then all will be lost.

Pls give me advice, so I can develop my idea following that.

I am doing my report for informal practise, I am planning to start drawing the first draft of my stroyboard and key frames

Ok that is all. wait till next week for more nonsense.

So as our team has been finally decided. I believe it`s time to start recording everything happened from now.

I typed #1 because I HOPE that I can do this report once per week. To make this thing continuous.

So the reason I start writing this thing is because i just finished the ppt for my first interim. I was thinking about writing some drafts about what I`m going to say. So I won`t make a scene of myself. I asked my partner to help me getting some primary resources about Guildhall allyship problems but I got no reply so…

Let`s hope that my partner is still working on that. Besides he/she said to come to the interim, that`s actually pretty nice.

And yes, I have not yet met my partner yet. So I don`t know how to call him/her.

That`s why this report will be almost all of myself talking about my ideas. Which probably means it`s boring and full of non-sense.

I only have 60-90 seconds so I narrow the whole “definition of intersectional allyship ” down to two parts. The idea of this fim is to speak of these two things:

To understand intersectionality.

To understand the importance of Allyship.

I am going to talk about one story about a office lady. She was the head of the department. She was asked to do a speech for her fellow collegues. She prepared the speech well and wrote down ideas she thought would be best for her company.

She walked to the stage and start talking, but later she found out that no one was paying attention. People were palying their phones, staring at their computers. No one was paying enough attention she deserved to have during that meeting.

When she spoke, people interrupted.

When she stated one opinion, people rejected. However later when others stated the same idea, people agreed.

Sooner or later she found out that she was the only female in that room.

And this is not fictional plot. This is the exact same experience shared by this lady during her TED Talk about allyship.

She also argues that in that meeting room, she was obviously discriminated through sexism.

However, there are much more factors that affect people`s situation in today`s society.

Gender,racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+, Veterans, disabilities and a lot more.

These different forms of discrimination sometimes combines themselves. which means sometimes solving one of them or solving them individually may not be enough.

That office lady is not alone. The society she lived in is complex. Where all of us influence others in different ways. To understand this intersectional influence we are having is crucial.

The point of Intersectionality is to understand that under a complex social system, people may be experiencing different kinds of discrimination at the same time. That sometimes when different inequalities add up, they form something that may not be solved by common ideas.

And we already know what will happen if those things continue to happen. The problem exists way back. It draws life from the root of society and was and is causing serious problems.

I was not so sure how to show the importance of allyship and how serious the problem is. My plan for now is to play some photographs to show the problem. Still animation is better.

I will do some of them but still, the ideas have not came to me yet.

At this stage I have this:

These are the consequences where things goes horribly wrong. The problems we are talking about has taken root long before. This cannot be changed in one night. The work spans generations and has to be done step by step. The idea must flow and pass to the next.

……Well that is what I was thinking about this speech. There is some moodboards and sentences I made. They are pretty boring so I didn`t put them up here.

That`s it. The first report. Let`s hope we will have the second one.

It`s been a while since the last update as I was fighting with maya and zbrush. After watching hours of tutorial videos and failed literally 3000+ times in Zbrush. I actually produced something quite nice.

But first, I am thinking maybe I should tell you the whole story from the very start. That means you are about to see a huge pile of chit-chat and boring, pale descriptive writings with numerous grammar mistakes up ahead. If you don`t want to see that, please scroll down to the very end and see my final result. Thanks.

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I planned to separate my design into two parts. the head part and the leg part. I planned to do this firts in Maya as I modeld my leg part quite easily:

As you can see for the sake of polycount limits most of the model is made of simple geometry shapes with really low faces. That means I changed my design from cylinders to pentagonal prisms, spheres to squares .etc. This move helps me to hold a control on polycounts and things were going so well. I checked my calendar and found out ‘ohh I still got time’ and then I started to do other stuff till the next session on Friday.

That`s where it all messed up. I finally realized why I did this with such short amount of time. I did it all wrong. I must weld the surfaces of each shapes to make sure they are really becoming a sole object. What I did up there was just put things over each other like toy blocks. Move one of them and the whole thing breaks down.

It is not that hard to fix it but it takes a long time. So, I decided to redo the whole thing on Zbrush.

That decision doesn`t make any sense. But I really want to try out Zbrush.

And here it comes to torture I add to myself. Zbrush is different from all the softwares I used before. It is hard to tell how much stress and frustration I felt during the learning process. I felt completely hopeless when I found out the only thing I know to do when I encounter a problem is to restart zbrush and start again.

But I did something eventually. It is a prototype of my head part 100% made of shame and tears.

So that`s when I started to go online and search for tutorials. And I cannot understand most of them. But I did found a word called ‘hard surface sculpting‘. That means instead of the rough, organic, chuncky meat-like surfaces up there, I make my model with smooth, flat surfaces. It is a common style mainly used when modeling weapons and robots that has artificial surfaces. And that suits my need as I am designing a robot. I did a few tryouts and one of them lookslike this down below:

So that`s what I am going to do. Instead of using brush and keep adding details on the model, I am going to slice it bit by bit and carve my details on the model. It`s becoming easy once you set up a goal and clean up your mind to focus on things you want to achieve. After that my workflow becomes like this:

Modeling>>Find problems>>Describe problems>>Ask Google>>Watch videos>>Solve problems>>Modeling.

And after about 40 hours without sleeping and eating, I finally had something that is not completely awful.

So I continued on from there and keep learning new tricks like arraymeshes, nanomeshes, boolean meshes radical symmetry .etc. I made a lot of mistakes and I found ways to hide them instead of fixing them. I know they are going to backfire on me in the future but I don`t care.

And after that is repetition of refining and adding new parts to my model. The software keeps crashing and at a certain point I cannot do anything to it anymore. I tried to refine it by lowing the polycounts, failed. I tried to cut off some part of it, failed. Clearly some of mv moves are not appropiate and messed up Zbrush`s working algorithm. My mistakes did backfired on me and I beileve they will keep doing so in the future.

But it did not stop me from adding new things on it. I finalized the design of my head and add three legs on my model.

I changed the material to a darker one to match up the robot feeling and that is what I got now:

That does looks neat right? However my trouble is not over yet. Modeling on Zbrush is not good for controlling the polycounts. Even half of my head part contains 253636 polycounts now which is more than 100 times more than the requirements. That is the next thing I am going to deal with and I wish myself good luck.

Well that`s a way shorter report than I imagined. The idea of this whole thing is to push my limits afar. I am glad that I didn`t give up and change my design to something really easy to model.

Well I did thought of that but I didn`t do it.

Thank you Luca and all those youtube videos, without you guys I cannot come this far by my own. This thing is still far from finished. I still got much work to do. Still, at this night I am satisfied of my work and I can finally go to sleep without my brain keep asking me how am I going to model this and that. That`s it for my report of week2 and 3. I`m out.