Category: Term3-sara

Project Members: Jingwen Zhang / Songyeuhuang
Project Type: Experimental Animation / Stylised Narrative Animation / Black-and-White Sketch Short Film

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Project Overview

Fragments of the Real is an experimental animated short film that explores war, trauma, emotional numbness, and the collapse of perception.

The story takes place in an abandoned theatre. At the centre of the stage, a young girl dances alone, while rows of silent, expressionless soldiers sit in the audience. As the dance continues, reality gradually begins to fracture. Guided by a fox, the girl enters a series of hallucinated spaces, including trenches, forests, ruined cities, and scenes of destruction.

These visions appear like fragments of memory. It is never completely clear whether they are real events, traumatic memories, or psychological projections from the girl’s inner world. Eventually, the film returns to the ruined theatre. A soldier stands up and shoots the girl. After she falls, the soldier salutes, while the other soldiers mechanically applaud. The final image shows a fox lying on the stage.

Through this cold, absurd, and fragmented visual language, the film aims to show that war does not only destroy human bodies. It also damages perception, emotion, and empathy, making people gradually lose their normal response to pain and death.

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Story Concept

The story is built around two central ideas: dance and war memory.

In this film, the girl’s dance is not simply a performance. It becomes an external expression of her psychological state. As the story develops, her movements become increasingly unstable and uncontrolled, suggesting that she is being affected by trauma, hallucination, and memory.

The fox acts as a guide between reality and hallucination. It can be understood as a symbol from the subconscious, or as a medium connecting the girl’s external world with her inner psychological space. The trenches, forest scenes, destroyed city, and suspended bodies together form a broken mental landscape.

The ending presents violence in a cold and almost absurd way. The girl is shot, yet the soldiers show no emotional reaction. Instead, they continue to applaud mechanically, as if death has become part of the performance. This moment highlights how war alienates human beings and weakens their ability to feel empathy.

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Visual Style

The project uses a black-and-white sketch aesthetic. We wanted the overall atmosphere to feel dark, oppressive, and slightly disturbing.

The visual texture is inspired by hand-drawn sketches, charcoal lines, rough scanned images, and printmaking. Instead of creating a polished and clean visual world, we chose to work with rough lines, strong shadows, unstable textures, and fragmented compositions.

The main visual keywords for this project include:

Black and white / Sketch / Ruins / Theatre / War / Soldiers / Fox / Fragmentation / Psychological space / Subtle horror / Emotional numbness / Mechanical movement

During the visual testing process, I focused on exploring how line quality, shadow, rough materials, and unstable image textures could create a space between reality and hallucination. We wanted the audience to feel that the world of the film is not fully stable, but constructed from memory, trauma, and distorted perception.

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Connection to the Brief

This project responds to the brief theme “Fragments of the Real / The Artificial.”

Rather than presenting reality as complete, stable, and objective, our film explores how reality can be broken apart and reorganised through trauma.

The theatre, trenches, forest, and ruined city are all fragments of the real world. However, in the girl’s perception, these spaces are rearranged into an unstable psychological map. Through animation, scene construction, and stylised visual experimentation, we transform real spaces into an artificial narrative environment filled with emotional and psychological meaning.

For me, “fragments of the real” does not only refer to physical fragments of space. It also refers to fragments of memory, emotion, and perception after they have been damaged by violence.

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Collaboration and Roles

Jingwen Zhang

In this project, I mainly focused on environment construction and visual style testing.

My responsibilities included the initial design and construction of key spaces, such as the abandoned theatre, war-related environments, the forest, and the ruined city. I also worked on visual experiments for the black-and-white sketch style, including line work, shadows, rough textures, and the slightly unsettling atmosphere of the film.

In addition, I contributed to a small part of the girl’s animation and tested cloth simulation for her movement. These tests helped explore how the girl’s body movement and costume dynamics could support the emotional tension of the dance.

Songyeu Huang

Songyeuhuang mainly focused on storyboarding, character animation, and camera movement.

He was responsible for the storyboard design and most of the character animation, including the movements of the girl, the fox, the soldiers, and some figures in the hallucination scenes. He also designed most of the camera movement and shot rhythm, helping to build the transitions between reality and hallucination.

His work played an important role in shaping the emotional pacing of the film, especially in how the camera moves between the theatre space and the fragmented hallucination sequences.

Process

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Personal Reflection

For me, this project was an important experiment in environment construction and stylised visual storytelling.

One of the main questions I explored was whether an environment could become more than just a background. In Fragments of the Real, the theatre, ruins, forest, and war spaces are not only locations where the story takes place. They also reflect the girl’s psychological state. The broken architecture, dark shadows, and unstable textures suggest the collapse of her inner world.

The black-and-white sketch style also allowed me to explore a more emotional and non-realistic visual language. The rough lines and imperfect textures make the images feel more like fragments of memory than a stable objective reality. This visual approach felt suitable for representing trauma, hallucination, and psychological instability.

This project also made me realise that animation does not always need to explain trauma through a clear and direct storyline. Sometimes, repeated images, fragmented spaces, symbolic animals, and mechanical human gestures can express psychological damage in a more subtle and powerful way.

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Project Summary

Fragments of the Real is an experimental animation project that transforms war trauma into a fragmented, cold, and unstable visual world.

Instead of using a traditional narrative to explain war directly, we used dance, hallucination, the fox, and mechanical soldiers to express how people gradually lose perception and emotion in violent environments.

Through this project, we explored how stylised animation can represent psychological experience. For me personally, it was also a valuable opportunity to experiment with black-and-white sketch aesthetics, ruined spaces, and unstable image textures. I hope these visual choices can strengthen the psychological atmosphere of the film and allow the environment itself to become part of the storytelling.

This week was One-One Tutorials. I introduced our project concept, story content, and current production progress to Sara in detail. Through this one-to-one tutorial, we were able to clarify the theme, visual style, and next steps of our project more clearly.

Our story takes place in a ruined theatre. A girl dances on the stage, while rows of numb soldiers sit around her. As her movements gradually become unstable, reality begins to fracture. The scene repeatedly flashes into another world: a white rabbit appears in front of her and leads her through trenches, forests, and destroyed city streets. These scenes cut into her dance like fragments of consciousness, making it difficult for the audience to tell whether they are memories, hallucinations, or present reality.

In terms of production, we showed Sara our current progress, including the UE5 stylized test, model and rig, and animation. We are testing a black, white, and grey visual style with woodcut printmaking and sketch-like textures. At the same time, we are continuing to work on character modelling, rigging, and animation. We hope to create a slightly unsettling, oppressive, and uneasy atmosphere through rough lines, strong contrast, and unstable visual rhythm.

Sara suggested that we create a simple storyboard next, so that we can organise the main shots, scene transitions, and narrative rhythm more clearly. She also recommended some AI websites to help us quickly generate visual references and storyboard sketches. This suggestion was very helpful because although our concept and atmosphere are already quite clear, we still need to visualise the story structure further. Next, we will complete an initial storyboard and then use it to adjust our animation shots and scene design.

This week’s session was Splatter in UE. We mainly learned how to create splatter, spray, and spreading spot effects in Unreal Engine. Splatter can be used to represent visual elements such as blood, ink, paint, or stains.

In class, I learned that these effects can be created through materials, textures, masks, or particle systems. By adjusting the colour, opacity, spreading range, and texture shape, splatter effects can appear on the ground, walls, or around characters.

I found this function very interesting because it is not only a technical effect, but can also enhance the emotion and atmosphere of an image. Its randomness and spreading quality can create a feeling of chaos, unease, or destruction. In future visual tests or artistic projects, I would like to try using similar effects.

This week’s session introduced 360 Video. I learned that 360-degree video does not present only one fixed camera view. Instead, it allows the audience to enter a space and look around freely. Therefore, when creating 360 video, we need to think not only about composition, but also about where the audience may choose to look. Creators can use sound, movement, lighting, or character placement to guide the viewer’s attention and avoid important information being missed. This class helped me understand that 360 Video is more like a form of spatial storytelling, creating a stronger sense of immersion than traditional video.

This week, we continued learning about Reality Capture. Compared with last week’s basic introduction, this session focused more on how to process and use scanned models in practice.

I learned that scanned models usually cannot be used directly after they are generated. They often need to be cleaned and optimised first. For example, we may need to remove unnecessary parts, fix incomplete areas, reduce the polygon count, and organise the textures. This helps the model run more smoothly in Unreal Engine and reduces performance issues.

After the model is processed, it can be imported into Unreal Engine and placed into a virtual scene. One of the biggest advantages of Reality Capture is that it can preserve real-world details and textures, making digital environments look more realistic.

Through these two weeks of learning, I think Reality Capture is a very useful creative tool. It can help us quickly collect real-world materials and connect reality with digital art. In the future, if my work involves cities, buildings, objects, or natural environments, I would like to continue experimenting with this technique.

This week’s session was about Reality Capture, also known as real-world scanning or photogrammetry. Sara introduced how we can turn real objects or spaces into digital models by taking photographs from different angles. In simple terms, Reality Capture is a method of bringing real-world materials into digital creation.

During the class, I tried scanning my own face. This helped me understand the process more directly. First, photos need to be taken from multiple angles to cover the shape and details of the subject as completely as possible. Then, these photos are imported into the software, where it identifies matching points between the images and generates a 3D model. After that, the model can be cleaned, textured, and optimised before being imported into Unreal Engine or other 3D software.

I found this process very interesting because it makes the boundary between reality and the virtual world less clear. In the past, I thought 3D models were mainly created through manual modelling, but Reality Capture offers another approach. Real faces, objects, buildings, or natural environments can all become part of a digital artwork. Scanning my own face especially made me feel that the real body can also be transformed into digital material.

This session made me realise that Reality Capture is not only a technical tool, but also a creative method. It allows artists to collect materials from the real world and reorganise them in a digital environment. In the future, if my work requires real objects, facial forms, or spatial textures, I would like to continue experimenting with Reality Capture as part of my visual research and production process.

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.

This week’s session was about VP / nDisplay. Sara introduced the basic concept of Virtual Production and the nDisplaysystem in Unreal Engine, which is commonly used for large-scale screen displays and multi-screen visual output. Through this class, I finally understood how many of the naked-eye 3D displays in commercial streets are created.

The key idea behind naked-eye 3D is not that the image is truly three-dimensional, but that it uses perspective from a specific viewing angle to create the illusion that an object is coming out of the screen or that the space is extending inward. To create this effect, artists usually need to build a virtual scene based on the real screen’s size, position, and viewing angle. Then, 3D content and camera settings are designed in Unreal Engine. The image must be adjusted according to the main viewing position of the audience, so that the screen edges, building corners, and virtual objects align correctly from that angle.

The basic workflow can be divided into several steps. First, the screen size, ratio, and viewing position need to be measured. Then, a matching virtual space is built in UE5. After that, 3D models, animation, and materials are created. Next, a suitable virtual camera angle is set up to match the real perspective of the screen. Finally, the image is output to the large screen through nDisplay or a similar system, followed by on-site testing and adjustment.

This lesson gave me a more direct understanding of virtual production. In the past, I only thought naked-eye 3D was a cool visual effect. Now I understand that it combines 3D modelling, animation, camera perspective, real-time rendering, and screen output technology. It also showed me that Unreal Engine can be used not only for games and animation, but also for commercial displays, public art, and immersive visual experiences.

This week’s session was Intro to VCam. Sara introduced the basic concept and usage of the virtual camera. VCam refers to Virtual Camera, which allows us to control the virtual camera in Unreal Engine 5 through a phone or tablet, simulating the way a real camera is used in filming.

Compared with directly setting camera keyframes in the software, VCam feels more intuitive and closer to real shooting. By moving and rotating a handheld device, we can control the camera’s position, angle, and movement, such as dolly-in, dolly-out, panning, or creating a natural handheld camera feeling. This gave me a new understanding of Unreal Engine 5’s real-time creative functions.

I felt very happy in this class because I learned a UE5 feature that I was not very familiar with before. It not only makes the process of shooting virtual scenes more flexible, but also shows me how digital creation and real cinematography can be more directly connected. VCam is not only a technical tool; it can also help creators explore camera language, spatial relationships, and ways of viewing more freely.