This project collaborated with Angelo Dotollo Callueng in Group B, who was in charge of 3D modelling the background and music composition, editing and 2D animation created by me.

The story illustrates a girl who envisions and transforms her unfortunate into a dazzling fantasy world. The concept of this piece is derived from escapism in the modern world. We used an ironic, omniscient tone to respond to the inhumane societal pressure and the neglect of individuals. We fixated the keywords on ‘Light, Pity and Vision’ during the brainstorming process. The sadness lies in our main character’s acceptance of her misfortune, relying on unrealistic ideas to release pressure, which is more common than fighting back. As a Chinese student, I have witnessed many friends of mine going under immense pressure from the hard-working environment, high expectations and fighting for a future. Success did pay off from their effort; however, within this process, some of them learned to internalize their voices simply because there is no way to change the world. In this animation, I hope to present the conflict of dream and reality, especially knowing that a single person cannot change society. 

 In this film, I transitioned several distinctive styles of animation inspired by ‘Sailor Moon’, ‘Kim- Possible’, Pisacco and my own. Through this, coupled with bright, lively colours, I hope to create a dazzling ‘forged reality’. The girl imagined herself to achieve all kinds of success and beauty in elegant colours to satisfy her unachievable fantasy. Each scene reflects her desperation of celebration for recognition, attention, love and attraction demonstrated by the teddy bear audience, fancy dress, blowing a kiss and the composition in each of her appearances. Suddenly, as the upbeat electronic music drops, reality hits. The girl sees her reflection in a mirror at the end of her hallucination. She goes back to being the ordinary person she tried to escape from; therefore, the transformation repeats. The music is inspired by Vocaloid, a Japanese singing synthesizer with an anime girl icon. Her music is usually upbeat, sung in an electronic voice. We believe that this narrates her personality very well in terms of the ‘unrealistic’ dreams and non-existence singer. In the beginning, I wanted Jazz music, imagining a grand show behind the veils with saxophone and trumpets. Still, we analyzed the character traits and agreed that electronic music could reiterate the fantastic vision more.

The 3D rendered background (all credits to Angelo) was one of the most exciting parts of this animation. To emphasize a sense of powerless and pity, we mainly incorporated a reversed triangular background composition that should be used to contrast with illusion and reality. In the illusion, the girl is dominating, extravagant and delicate, whereas she is the polar opposite. Lighting was a significant part of the 3D rendering, where we had many versions of lights and decided the overarching colour was pink. We mainly used stage lighting to reiterate the superficial atmosphere. The style has completely changed at the ending to emphasize the pathetic state of reality. Although it is difficult to see under the dim lighting, the room is filled with trash and broken objects. The only light source is from the ceiling light and a broken TV. As we are both used to realistic or anime drawing to proportions, during the creation of the bedroom scene, we both had to remember to over exaggerate everything. Our first versions were too small and timid and lacked power in the final animation. Through this experience, we both learned to ask for a brand new perspective’s view for feedback and go out of our comfort zone to over enlarge everything. 

Mostly, the 2D animation blended well with the 3D background, to our surprise. I had some attempts trying to match both styles in various styles. Due to Adobe Animator’s setups, it is hard to create very detailed strokes with a lot of texture. The conclusion is that more obvious 2D tries to stand out better, it works. I believe our next step is to create more powerful, concise lines and simplify everything. Overall, our work is still immature and lacks depth, which can be improved by adding more layers in the foreground, especially the middle ground. Bolder outlines for the character is also what I would like to improve on. Although we had many versions of our character, I still felt that she was not memorable. Still, overall this had been an extraordinarily eventful and fun experience, trying our new perspectives, animating style and working closely with 3D worlds.