Fangyi Ren

This five-week modelling course gave me a very intense experience, as the subject required me to do more in-depth research in areas I had never noticed before, and I did not have the relevant knowledge. At first I thought of something very complex, even an antique with a very complicated functioning principle, but when I tried to make a rough shape, neither steam nor light could be presented directly on the object, and I searched art websites for keywords in order to clearly find the same features between the two, but I didn’t find any useful information. I went to academic websites but couldn’t find anything either. When I started the second week of classes I still didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to do, but rather than just pick one and start working on it, I asked my classmates for help first. The communication was very helpful and my classmates helped me to clarify some unclear concepts. And I had a device that I wanted to make, ditching the complicated idea，using wind energy, wheel and gears to make an octave box. The simplest and most straightforward works best for me now. I have combined an octave box powered by internal parts with a wind chime rings by wind energy. The first octave box invented by the Swiss Antoine Fabre in 1796, the largest cabinet jukebox, the most demanding playing environment and what has been described as the most “delicate” octave box – this is the first octave box invented by the Swiss Antoine Fabre in 1796. Although hundreds of years have passed, the winding and gears of the inner case are still intact and can be used not only to play music but also as a stamp. The piano, which used perforated paper as ‘sheet music’ and was played by compressing the airbag with a compressed air current and then pulling the arm lever, was created in the 19th century and was a precursor to the phonograph. I tried to use this concept in my modelling, using air flow to move the parts of the octave box to make beautiful music. The most difficult part of the modelling was the wings of the little girls， After trying one of each, I felt that the hand shape was too limited for the octavo and chose wings. I used a cylinder and then cut and stretched the model, after making some adjustments, I got the shape I have now. When applying the material, I actually wanted a simple wood grain texture at first, but then, out of some personal understanding, I made the octavo, which had always been popular with wood grain, into a material with a modern twist. I think the thing that kept bothering me was how to execute the shapes I had in mind and use the basic objects to make the prototypes of the parts. I have actually found a number of times during the piecing process where I built something wrong and tried to change it but already spent a lot of time here, maybe sometimes after the change I still thought the previous one looked better. The model that came out was very different from what I had imagined. I had to try to pick the important areas and rebuild them, then do test-and-error to get the desired effect, in terms of the results I think I may have made too simple model and not done enough research to support my ideas, but this is the best I can do at this stage after getting familiar with the various software.

This five week has taught me different processes for animating than I have ever done before. At the beginning I did a mind map and searched keywords on art websites, but I actually started animating in harmony a little late because I didn’t have a very clear direction.I couldn’t be the kind of student who was clear about their goals right from the start, I either hesitated for a long time in choosing the style of animation and the direction of the character’s story, or I made decisions too quickly leading to unconsidered questions popping up when I making the animation. This made me a little nervous about learning harmony, and worried about how many problems I would have in deciding non-human character. I decided to use a clay snake that was freshly created by a child as my character. This clay snake had just been made up and very curious about the world. One way of exploring this world is to imitate what happening around it, to experience things that it doesn’t have. But the world is too varied for this little snake ，it gradually turns back into a puddle of clay.I did get stuck a lot during the process because of my lack in drawing skills,I find that the character’s mouth is much more lively in a sideways position than in frontal position, so I have a lot of sideways talking in my animation. Also, I think the character speaks with a little bit of unconscious smugness, so I make the character tilt his head slightly. To enrich the body language a bit, I made the tail of the snake look like a finger, the finger would move with the shaking of the body.Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) At first I tried to use After effect to create an entire animation, but soon realised that this behaviour was meaningless and did not enable me to make objective decision about my pathway for the next year based on what I had learned. Sometimes the hardest thing is not the actual problems I face, it is the arrogance of thinking that I have the knowledge to solve a pending course. The final animation is not a delicate, but I did follow the steps of living voice, carefully simulating my own Pronunciation, studying the background features that serve to highlight the main character, and using after effect to do a bit editing. In the process of using this software, some problems with the installation prevented me to check the transparency of the previous frame and I had to imagine or switch frames frequently to draw the next one, which stopped my progress for a week. I chose the fourth of the five audio, a kid talking about why he doesn’t want to be a billionaire. I thought it was interesting and could relate to a previous project I had done about a housewife who gave everything she had but no one noticed her. So I started working on the character design, but some research in the first two weeks made me realise that the animation didn’t quite relate effectively to the previous project. This left me a little disappointed and feeling like I wasted my time. But in the second two weeks, after I slowly learnt how to use harmony, it did give me the passion to learn about unfamiliar software when I successfully used keyframes to create continuous animation. At the end stage, I could not export transparent PNG4 sequences and the tutorials could not answer my questions, so I tried many other methods and asked many people before finally solving the problem. In the middle of numerous such difficulties, I gradually understood the benefits of communication and became worried about the more difficult learning ahead, but more than that, I was helped by what I learnt during the year.

My progress is much slower because I just solved the transparency problem last Friday. You could notice that I didn’t fill the colours and didn’t check the distortion well.

I had trouble animating the character because I didn’t know how to use this long shape to make a powerful pose. I tried to find references, but didn’t find some helpful material.

This was a difficult week for me because I was unable to apply the recorded audio to the animation very well. the first thing I did was an eye roll animation.In choosing the sound to attract the attention I chose the sound of a mobile phone message and the buzzing sound of mosquito so that the eyes would have a searching motion，but I couldn’t find anything to make a sound like bleeding, so I didn’t add a sound effect. I actually paid too much attention to animation rather than sound this week, reversing the priorities in processing, this led to my final assignment looking less like a sound processing theme and more like a animation assignment.

For example, if I want to do a social issue, gender discrimination, I have to find out what impact this gender discrimination will have on the people around me, or on a particular group of people.

And housewives are incredibly likely to have emotional problems. It means that people are herd animals and if they can’t communicate with the community and their family members ignore them, then they are bound to have psychological problems. Housewives have really become a minority in these busy times, and the opportunity to even unite and communicate with each other may not be frequent. The Japanese urban housewife: Traditional and modern social participation(Anne et al., 1987) …

Anne, E. (1987) ‘The Japanese urban housewife: Traditional and modern social participation
‘, The Social Science Journal, 24(2), pp. 139-156.

In fact, I think the theme I made should be the issue of neglect of the housewife’s labour within the family. Rather than the neglect of the minority group of housewives in society. Maybe this part could be mentioned, but it cannot be the focus of the whole structure. I should have thought about how to tell the story of labour neglect.

I’m not sure how to make the plot seem reasonable and natural. At first I thought the neglect within the family members to the housewife’s labour was a good feature for the plot

My initial thought is about a family in which the things get messed up set themselves up, the father and son are not surprised when they wake up with breakfast already on the table, which the father and son are so accustomed to. The days passed, gradually the prepared meals and washed dishes became dirtier and dirtier, and eventually the two gradually drowned in the mess.

I don’t think the story is clear because at the end the two are drowned in rubbish doesn’t prove anything and would create a unclear narrative.