This week was Project Feedback. My classmate Songyeu Huang and I are planning to work together on an experimental animation project this term. We shared our initial ideas and visual references with Sara.
At this stage, we are interested in creating an animation with a woodcut printmaking or sketch-like texture. The overall visual style may be mainly black, white, and grey, using rough lines, strong contrast, visible textures, and unstable image changes. We want the atmosphere to feel slightly unsettling or horror-like, but not through direct jump scares. Instead, we hope to create a sense of pressure, strangeness, and unease through the visual language.
For the theme, we are currently focusing on human inner emotions, such as anxiety, fear, and pain. We do not want the animation to simply tell a clear traditional story. Instead, we hope it can work more like an externalisation of a psychological state, allowing the audience to experience the emotional changes of the character. For example, the space may become distorted, the character may be duplicated or transformed, and the images may shift like fragments of memory.
We showed Sara some animation references, including Body Echo and Forever. In Body Echo, I was interested in the idea of another self and overlapping spaces, which made me think about how a divided character could represent inner conflict. Forever uses LiDAR scanning and point-cloud visuals to explore memory, data, and death. Its non-traditional visual form also inspired us to think about experimental animation language.
Through this feedback session, I realised that we need to further clarify the core concept of our project. We need to ask: where do the anxiety and fear come from? How can the visual style support the theme? Next, we will continue collecting references, developing the story structure, and testing woodcut, sketch, and black-and-white texture effects.
