Elsa's Super Animation

Categories
FMP

FMP Proposal | Updates and Development 02

As my FMP project has developed, I have made several changes to the original proposal, including the project title, theme, character design, and story structure. I have also updated the storyboard and completed an initial music demo.

These changes are mainly inspired by my personal feelings as graduation approaches. I want the animation to reflect the anxiety, uncertainty, and questions about the future and freedom that I am experiencing as I prepare to enter the working world.

1. Project Title

Rushing Place

The project title has changed from Through the Snow to Rushing Place.

The new title better reflects the feeling I want to express: constantly chasing time, efficiency, and the pace of others without knowing exactly where we are heading.

Rather than telling a specific story, I want to create an experience of constantly moving forward without being able to stop.

2. Project Overview

Rushing Place is an experimental animation exploring urban anxiety and the boundaries of freedom.

The film focuses on a numb but persistent feeling of anxiety. People constantly chase time, efficiency, and the pace of others, often without knowing what they are chasing.

Through stylised black-and-white visuals, experimental imagery, and music that gradually accelerates into chaos, the animation turns this psychological state into an audiovisual experience.

The project is inspired by the uncertainty and pressure young people face as they prepare to enter society. Influenced by social expectations and conventional life paths, we often feel pushed towards the next stage without questioning whether it is truly our own choice.

The film also explores the relationship between freedom and boundaries: does escaping established rules and directions necessarily mean finding true freedom?

3. Character Introduction

Elsa

Elsa is named after my English name and represents my personal emotions and experiences. The entire animation unfolds through her inner perspective.

She often feels trapped in a crowd, her body carried forward by the movement and rhythm of those around her. Time, social expectations, and traditional life stages constantly define her next “destination”. Gradually, she begins to question whether she is choosing her own direction or simply following others.

Elsa longs for nature and freedom. Her thoughts often drift away from the crowded city into open, boundless natural spaces.

However, when familiar structures and directions disappear, she begins to feel a different kind of uncertainty and unease.

She wants to escape restrictions but is also afraid of losing direction. Caught between order and freedom, she continues searching for a rhythm that feels truly her own.

4. Storyboard Development

Following the changes to the project theme, I have redesigned and expanded the storyboard.

Compared with the original version, the new storyboard includes more shots and environments, with a faster and tighter overall pace.

I have focused more on creating fast and smooth transitions between scenes. By using similar compositions, shapes, and movement directions, I aim to connect different spaces naturally.

I also want to use changes in editing pace to reflect Elsa’s emotional state. As the animation progresses, the cuts become faster, allowing the audience to experience her anxiety and the feeling of being constantly pushed forward.

These changes make the animation less dependent on traditional linear storytelling, with a stronger focus on visual rhythm and emotional expression.

5. Music Development

I have completed an initial music demo for the animation.

As Rushing Place mainly communicates emotions through visuals and sound, music will play an important role in the storytelling.

The demo is built around a gradually accelerating rhythm. As the animation progresses, the music becomes faster, with more sound elements layered together, eventually creating a dense and chaotic listening experience.

I also plan to synchronise the music with camera movements, cuts, and scene transitions to create a consistent audiovisual rhythm.

The demo is still an early version and will be further developed alongside the animation.

Categories
2.1 Advanced and Experimental 3D Computer Animation Techniques

Week 20 |

Categories
Term3-sara

Fragments of the Real｜An Experimental Animation Project about War, Trauma and Fragmented Perception

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Categories
Term3-sara

Final work

Categories
FMP

FMP Proposal ｜ Update and Development

Through the Snow

A Halftone Psychological Animation

Concept Design

1. Project Concept

This is a 4–5 minute stylised 3D animated short film.

The story follows a young woman who has just lost her job and gradually collapses under the pressure of the city and the subway. She moves through crowded, cold, and repetitive urban spaces before unexpectedly entering a “snow forest” made of black-and-white dots, noise, scanning traces, and photocopy-like textures.

At first, she believes that she has entered a place where she can escape from reality. However, as the story develops, she slowly realises that this snow forest is not a natural environment. Instead, it is an internal psychological space formed by her accumulated anxiety, shame, self-denial, and frozen emotions.

The three main spaces in the project use different stylised visual languages:

City Space

The city uses dot matrix, halftone dots, and printed grain to express information overload, job-hunting pressure, and the feeling of the individual being compressed and flattened by the urban system.

Subway Space

The subway uses scanning, CCTV textures, low-resolution imagery, and horizontal scan lines to express mechanical repetition, surveillance, and the feeling of the character being constantly read, observed, and squeezed by the crowd and the city system.

Snow Forest Space

The snow forest uses X-ray-like imagery, negative images, psychological visuals, and black-and-white noise to reveal the emotions that are frozen, hidden, and finally exposed inside the character.

2. Logline

An unemployed young woman escapes from the pressure of the city into a snowy forest made of printed noise, only to realise that the snow is formed from her own frozen emotions.

3. Theme

This animation explores how people under pressure, unemployment, self-denial, and anxiety often believe they are only trapped by external reality. However, what truly traps them may also be the internal emotions that have been accumulated and frozen over time.

The central idea is:

The snow is not natural snow, but emotional noise.

4. Genre

3D Animated Short Film / Experimental Psychological Animation / Artistic Narrative Video

5. Visual Style

The overall visual style is built around black and white, low-resolution imagery, scanning, dot matrix, photocopy texture, X-ray imagery, noise, and psychological visuals.


 

Moodboard

1.Scene 1: City

Visual Style:

Halftone / Dot Matrix / Printed Noise / Urban Poster Texture

The city scene represents the pressure the young woman faces after losing her job. Visually, the city can look like an enlarged newspaper photograph, a low-resolution printed advertisement, or a black-and-white poster. Characters, buildings, streets, and advertising screens are covered with halftone dots and printed textures.

The city is not presented as a warm and realistic living space. Instead, it feels like an urban image that has been repeatedly copied, distributed, and consumed. As the girl moves through this space, her body is gradually covered by dot patterns, suggesting that she is being compressed and flattened by job pressure, social judgement, and information noise.

Keywords:

Halftone Dots / Dot Matrix / Printed Noise / Newspaper Texture / Urban Poster

Video Reference:

https://builders-club.com/3d-motion/openai-the-intelligence-age

Scene 2: Subway

Visual Style:

Scanning / CCTV / Horizontal Scan Lines / Digital Compression

The subway scene represents the pressure of commuting space and the crowd. The image can resemble CCTV footage, security scanning imagery, or a low-resolution screen image, with horizontal scan lines, flickering, image tearing, and digital compression noise.

The subway carriage feels like a constantly operating machine, while the passengers appear like images scanned by a system. The girl is squeezed, observed, and read inside the carriage. Her emotions become increasingly unstable as the scan lines flicker.

When her anxiety intensifies, the scan lines become denser and faster. The edges of the characters begin to shake, and the whole image starts to resemble a broken surveillance screen, showing that she is gradually unable to cope with the pressure of reality.

Keywords:

Scanning Lines / CCTV Texture / Digital Glitch / Compression Noise / Surveillance Image

Video Reference:

https://www.zippyframes.com/shorts/forever-mitch-mcglocklin

Scene 3: Snow Forest

Visual Style:

X-ray / Negative Image / Frozen Noise / Psychological Landscape

The snow forest is the girl’s inner psychological space. The snow here is not natural snow, but is made of noise, black-and-white particles, negative-image textures, and X-ray-like imagery.

The trees, snow, and the girl’s body can have a semi-transparent or X-ray-like layered quality, as if her hidden emotions are finally being exposed. The snow particles represent her long-accumulated anxiety, shame, self-denial, and emotional freezing.

As she begins to face herself, the chaotic noise gradually gains direction and eventually gathers into butterflies. The butterflies are not simply a symbol of healing, but a sign that her emotions are beginning to flow again. They guide her away from the snow forest, not towards a perfect ending, but towards the courage to face reality again.

Keywords:

X-ray Texture / Negative Image / Frozen Noise / Emotional Landscape / Butterfly Particles

Video Reference:

https://www.aliaschman.com/films/bodyecho

Storyboard

Progress Update

So far, I have completed the initial project concept, some visual style tests, and part of the storyboard shot design.

For the visual test, I started experimenting in UE5 with a 3D scene combined with a Post Process Halftone material. I first built a simple 3D scene, then used a post-process material to turn the image into a black-and-white halftone dot effect. This test is mainly used to develop the printed, low-resolution, and noisy visual style for the city scene.

The halftone material creates dots based on the brightness of the image: darker areas have larger and denser dots, while brighter areas have fewer or smaller dots. This creates a look similar to newspaper printing or photocopied images. Through this test, I found that this visual style can express the pressure of the city and the feeling of the character being compressed and flattened.

I have also completed part of the storyboard shot design, focusing on the girl’s emotional journey after losing her job: moving through the city, entering the subway, and gradually reaching the snow forest. Next, I will continue developing the storyboard and further test the subway scanning-line effect and the X-ray / negative-image style for the snow forest.

Timeline

Month 1: Concept Development and Visual Tests

In the first month, I will continue developing the project concept, character background, and story structure. I will also refine the storyboard and decide the main shots for the city, subway, and snow forest scenes. At the same time, I will keep testing the visual style in UE5, especially the halftone effect for the city, the scanning-line effect for the subway, and the X-ray / negative-image look for the snow forest.

Month 2: Previs and Scene Building

In the second month, I will start building simple 3D versions of the main environments and create a rough previs based on the storyboard. The focus will be on camera movement, scene transitions, and the emotional rhythm of the film. I will also test how the character moves through the different spaces and how the visual style changes from one scene to another.

Month 3: Animation Tests and Project Refinement

In the third month, I will begin testing key animation moments, such as the girl walking through the city, feeling trapped in the subway, and entering the snow forest. I will also test the butterfly particles and how they appear from the noise. By the end of this stage, I hope to have a clearer previs, stronger visual tests, and a more complete production plan for the next stage of the project.

Categories
2.1 Advanced and Experimental 3D Computer Animation Techniques

Week 19 Blog：Professional Practice

This week, Ting talked to us about professional practice and career development. Besides animation skills, she also explained how to collaborate with colleagues, communicate clearly, and stay professional in a real project environment.

In class, Ting mentioned that when we face a problem in a project, we should not immediately pass it to someone else. We should first try to solve it ourselves, such as reopening Maya, rebooting the machine, or looking for documentation and tutorials. If the problem still cannot be solved, we can then ask close classmates, colleagues, or more experienced people. For technical problems, we can ask the lead, TD, or group chat. If the issue is more important or related to decision-making, then we can ask the supervisor.

I found this lesson very useful because communication directly affects teamwork and efficiency. When asking a question, we should clearly explain what problem we have, what we were doing, what we have already tried, and what we think the possible reason might be. This makes the question more professional and easier for others to understand.

This class made me realise that becoming an animator is not only about making good animation. It is also important to work well in a team, stay polite, solve problems actively, and communicate in a clear and professional way.

Categories
Term3-sara

Week 19 Blog: One-One Tutorials

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.

Categories
2.1 Advanced and Experimental 3D Computer Animation Techniques

Week 18 Blog：Studio Library & Animation Progress

This week, Ting introduced us to Studio Library. It is a useful plugin for Maya animation, mainly used to save and manage character poses and animation clips. It works like an animation library, allowing us to store useful poses, facial expressions, or movement sections and reuse them later. Compared with adjusting the controllers again every time, Studio Library can make the animation workflow more efficient and help us manage different versions of movement.

In class, we also continued the Piranha Plant attack project from last week. This time, the task was to make the Piranha Plant jump down three steps before connecting it to the attack animation against Mario. This exercise helped me understand the importance of transitions between actions. A character should not only complete separate movements, but also have continuous rhythm, clear weight shifts, and proper anticipation, so the jump and attack can feel natural.

At the same time, I continued improving my girl dancing animation. Based on previous feedback, I kept adjusting the body weight, pelvis rotation, and movement rhythm. I also tried using nCloth to create a skirt for the girl, hoping the fabric could move more naturally with her body. This made me think more about the relationship between character animation and cloth simulation, and how technical testing can influence the final visual result.

Categories
Term3-sara

Week 18 Blog: Splatter in UE

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.

Categories
2.1 Advanced and Experimental 3D Computer Animation Techniques

Week 17 Blog：Workshop AnimBot

This week, Ting introduced us to the animation plugin AnimBot, which is a useful tool for animation work in Maya. It can help animators adjust keyframes more efficiently, copy and mirror poses, change timing, organise curves, and create smoother transitions. Compared with adjusting each controller manually, AnimBot can make the animation workflow faster and more convenient.

In class, Ting demonstrated some basic functions of AnimBot, such as how to quickly adjust poses, control animation timing, and make movements feel smoother. After that, we tried using the plugin to create an animation of a Piranha Plant attack. This exercise required us to show the plant character preparing, building up energy, and then attacking suddenly, so the rhythm and impact of the movement were very important.

Through this workshop, I found that AnimBot is not only a tool for improving efficiency, but also helpful for controlling timing and animation details more clearly. In the future, when working on more complex animation shots, I would like to continue using AnimBot to support pose adjustment, timing, and polishing.