This is a project collaborating with the Guildhall school of Music and Drama. We aim to raise awareness of micro aggressive behaviors within school communities. Hoping to evoke more empathy among student and teachers to build a harmonious environment.

I am making this animation with April (YiFei) Long from our course, and Eleanor from Guildhall School of Drama focusing on identifying micro – aggression and micro – invalidation.

Micro- aggression is a constant type of bully where the majority of a community or a party of authority towards a less common party. This not only happen to someone who is new to a environment or culture, but any one who happened to be categorized as ‘different’. This can be a subconscious action to establish power. By irrationally generalizing people into different status based on appearance, behavior or culture, creates smaller groups to fit into. The aggressor demeans other’s value to raise their own group’s status.

Micro – aggressors often conduct subtle but “hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes toward stigmatized or culturally marginalized groups”. These conscious or subconscious actions may not have immediate impact, but as time accumulates, the targeted party develops acceptance to these paper-cut- like commentaries, hence allows their boundaries to be pushed back further. Eventually submits to the more powerful parties’s ideologies. Through this discrete transformation, the targeted party often develop self- doubt towards their identity under fear to fit in with the major community hence giving into per pressure. In the long term consequence of the unfriendly behavior influences the targeted party to internally disapprove of themselves and often their background that can lead to mental distress.

I was an example of Micro- Aggression when I first joined a secondary school in the UK. Due to language barrier, my culture identity and behaviors were challenged based on my Chinese ethnicity. The scary thing was that I failed to identify form a lack of experience, that I was being mistreated. This imposed hatred caused a lot of internal aggression. As a result I tried to deny my culture, forgetting about my own country and question my place.

Looking back at my own experience, giving into pressure and fitting into the environment did not assisted with finding a sense of belonging. In my attempts of blending with my surrounding culture, I had a internal voice that could not be ignored, constantly unease by the surroundings. In this swirl of asserting power, it was important to recognize your differences verses other’s intentions. This will help set one’s own ground, and see clearer of all sorts of mischievous ignorance and have the courage to withstand mistreatment, remaining one’s true self.

Therefore, I want to make an animation film hoping to highlight some forms of micro-aggression and the process of transition of self indulgence caused by it. We aim to convey the seriousness of this action visually and in narrative through inventive use of mix media animation. Our initial story line including story board is as follows: ‘A person joins Guildhall school of Music and Drama and its ego was demolished by the Micro-aggressive environment. ’ We are not keen on including a solution or a happy ending to the story due to time restrictions. We believe that some times a tragedy can make more emotional impact to urge the audience to emphasis.

Character Design

Although this project is stress to increase awareness and prevent racial discrimination among the staffs in Guildhall School of Music and Drama, we see micro aggression not only in ethnic disparities, but also cultural and personally. As an attempt to raise equality in a general concern, we decided to make an all inclusive character. This led to character design of based on a Paper person.

The personification of a paper man not only allows us to experiment with multi media animation and cross dimensional imagery, also explores with metaphors such as ‘fragility’, ‘malleable‘ and ‘paper-cuts’ in relation to its material qualities.

The experience of micro – aggression is like receiving paper – cuts. It doesn’t seem like a lot at first, but it hurts constantly. Every time someone looks at me in a certain way, says a certain phrase. They may not mean it, but it adds a new paper cut on top of the ones from yesterday, and more from tomorrow. Our Paper figure will be done in stop motion, which adds more visual depth in creating contrast with 2D animated back ground.

Animation Planning

First of all, we wanted to incorporate a range of styles of animation as a representation of a diversified environment. Every character or settings will be drawn in a different style, each drawing style is unique, just like every individual student. Origionally, we wanted to use windows to show

We wanted to explore AI animation following the recent trend of AI animation on the internet. Interestingly there has been a growing controversy on the legitimacy of AI art works. As most AI art are created from ‘studies’ based on existing human art work around the internet, it copies but does not invent new, therefore can be unethical to publish for commercial use. Furthermore, general voices on the internet indicate concerns for technology to replace human artists. Especially in the current time AI is still a developing technology, which is hard to imagine its full potential interacting with human society on a large scale. This concern soon elevated by the case of artist who won a drawing contest using an AI artwork. The comments towards this case convey hostilities towards Artificial intelligence.

Making of the animation

Music

Considering the experimental nature of the visuals, we wanted the music to be electronic and electronic too. After three drafts from Eleanor from GSMDwe finally settled on our final version. Originally we also wanted to add machanic voices whispering in various languages “what are you doing here?” “who invited you?”. The result was not very pleasing due to the limitations of google translate, but the sounds is already very complete, to avoid overcrowding the animation, it was done in text in the final version.

Critical Apperasial

Reflecting on the creative journey of this project has taught me the importance of a clear message through many stages of development and client feedback. I used to create highly conceptual works, thinking that abstract art offers freedom of interpretation. Animation for clients is something different from my usual style. Considering the appropriation of text, inclusiveness rather than a personal expression of emotions is a crucial skill for future works. Our initial approach was too personal and broad. We had too much to express, which made it chaotic and unoriented, eventually diluting our message. Through increasing understanding and analyzing the client’s requirements, we concise our imaginaries, clarified the visuals and even used subtitles. In the end, we formed a clear synopsis that pushed us to base the concept on reality. Although it was painful to change our ideas, we learned to corporate with client needs and our creative visions.
Another challenge we faced was the compatibility of the music. Our violent visuals clashed with the musician’s classical style. I first envisioned the music as noisy and chaotic. However, the musician cleverly integrated classical instruments with our flashy visuals, balancing saturated images with slow, quiet tunes bringing unexpecting layers of contrast.
Aside from successes, we also had unfulfilled ambitions such as background creation and more complicated scenes walking on water. We could experiment with other materials with proper equipment and lighting. This ties in with my weakness in time management and forehead planning. I often need more consideration of planning for many filming processes and often fail to prepare everything or think of too complicated scenes. This improved as I became more familiar with Aftereffects when I assembled broken footage into layers and had a chronological progression story formed. I started making a blog sheet crossing out each stage and the shots needed.
Overall, these successful projects exercise the animation production processes and work with real clients. I learned to simplify my messages and work for more straightforward ones. The final product is advantageous, seeing harmony through all our contrasts.