Today Jinny and I met Seb and Lewis in their house and talked about the collaboration supposed to be coming in resent months. It could be seen they have quite much passion on this and took this to heart. It can be foreseen this negotiation can bring us precious energy.

After that I tried the CATrig tool for the first time. It is even more convenient than Jay told me. After watching a video tutorial less longer than a quarter, my character shows a nice walking movement.

Of course, The exact actions in the animation would be much more complicated. On the contrary, with this tackle, some time-consuming work can be much more effective than it ever be.

As planned, the animation I will make for final project is going to be a conceptual show. This would be a short video rendering nature, wildness and an ancient Chinese theory: Wu Xing, which is also called Five Elements.

It would not be easy to make this as attractive as other animations by the reason of its abstraction. Even majority of contemporary Chinese can not understand this system profoundly. It could be more difficult to make it interesting enough for audiences. On the other hand, after some consideration, I think it still worth to have a try, due to some reasons.

Firstly, there are many flexible methods to show this concept. When I listened to Erik Kessels' lecture 'Strong Ideas Allow You to Blur', I realised I need not to make the whole animation with traditional Chinese components rigidly. I can create a scene of a modern city, and show the elements through 5 different animals. As a matter of fact, there were 4 separated animals (Dragon, Phonix, Tiger and Turtle) representing 4 of the 5 elements with which I can find a way to create characters. For the last element 'Earth' with no specific relative animal, I will make a wolf to fill this blank.

Secondly, this theory can only be a fundamental thought for creating the animation. On the contrary, there are some other significant aspects to qualify a visual work, such as editing, colorizing, and character shape.

There are two videos I watched gave me pretty enormous inspiration. One is ShapeShifter made by the studio Charlx, the other is Relentless 'Virtues' directed by Ross Carins. They both showed the power and energy in splendid camera languages. Additionally, there were sufficient commercial worth contained as well.



ShapeShifter from CHRLX on Vimeo.



Relentless 'Virtues' from James MacLachlan on Vimeo.

Another fresh objective for me is learning composing. This might not be easy. However if I really am interested in the visual effect industry, this skill will be critical for me to possess.

Fortunately I met a nice fella in the summer meeting of 'Collahub' which is a really useful organisation worth to join in. After Rowan told me, I effectively found an undergraduate student called Sebastian quite wishing on this cooperation.

Generally speaking, there would be lots of work to finish in coming months. Meanwhile what I would learn and gain would be optimistic.