Small Brief 2: Lifting Tower - Production Diary

Roles:

Generally it works out that Galuh does more image making and bits of animating while I contribute ideas to image making, storyboard the sequences and animate but we quite versatile swapping between these specific roles since we know both process of animating and illustrating quite well.

Initial colour palette:
Pink, yellow and white


1. flickering neon matryoshka Jesus

final character design

neon style test

Galuh's cutout 1

Galuh's cutout 2

The face is clearer when the black and white in the outline drawing are inverted.

neon matryoshka animation

2. eating matryoshka Jesus -> Jesus eating turkey

We are not happy with the style test because the profile of the jesus character does not show prominent features of the facade we have designed.

eating style test

We created a simpler design by taking just the head of the character. The triangular outline was a happy accident as we drew construction line while figuring out how Jesus's hair should look like on profile view. It helps us to work more efficiently such that I can do the animation in basic shapes and Galuh can add the details afterwards, and make the drawings consistent.

our updated design

Instead of eating smaller matryoshkas, we changed the animation into a race between two Jesus character eating their turkey drumsticks to make both themes overlap.

jesus eats turkey animation

3. farting turkey

turkey style test

We made a major technical mistake as we only use the warm LED light attached to the rostrum when animating. The resulting image sequences becomes too dark and too reddish. For the december deadline I have tried to do colour corrections on After Effects (wrong software!!).

turkey fart animation

Final piece colour corrected using Premiere:


Lifting Tower: Turkey from Brenda Christie Muliawan on Vimeo.

In the first and second crit Jimmy said the matryoshka Jesus series will work well. However, he emailed us after we have wrapped up the project that we can't use them because of the Greggs christmas ads controversy. We decided not to rush another animation despite this because we have other pressing commitments to do (COP3 and the short film brief).

Small Brief 2: Lifting Tower - Idea Generation

The brief is to create 5-10 secs christmas themed animation to be screened on the Lifting Tower at Wellington Place, which is one of Leeds' business district. It is suggested to use bright and bold shapes and colours for the animations since the brick wall is quite textured.

I've decided to work with Galuh from illustration who usually works with collage and paper cutout. However this time we take this opportunity to animate with other traditional media (plasticine collage and hand-drawn) to explore different aesthetics since we are meant to keep the ideas straightforward. Our ideas take inspiration from subjects iconic to christmas and create peculiar scenario based on these subjects.