Out of Your Head

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When we got this project, we had already started to think about our concept and what ultimately attracted us was about dreams and reality, so we decided to draw some wonderful scenes and a brutal environment in order to create this kind of comparison, we realized there are few words can fit this atmosphere, they are mountain and forest, mountains always remind us of cruelty and oppression, to the contrary, forest can be warm and cheerful because of the beautiful scenery and animals. If we want to show the cruelty and oppression, we need dangerous and death, then we made the mountain became the snow mountain to let audiences feel the cruelty, also, a screen of storm devours the footprint was a part of our storyboards. About the dream, we added it a warm color filter and a very prominent orange light source, so that it can be in the other side of that snow mountains and storm, vibrant, this will be the key words of dream, so the deer appeared in our animation, this was aimed to show the vitality, what is more, we think the deer is a very spiritual creature and this will help us a lot to create atmosphere of dream. So in the last the five words that we decided were mountain, footprint, devour, forest and light, the story is an old man trudged on a snowy mountain with long footprints behind him, but the storm swallowed him up. As he lay dying, he seemed to see the forest he had always dreamed of. The deer danced softly before his eyes and birds sung around his ears, and we do not know will anyone find him because his track have been buried under the snow. 
 
In the process, we encountered many problems. We could not get the same style in visuals, I prefer a more realistic style while Lily prefers a cartoon style, I think realism helps enhance the atmosphere and she thinks flatness is the soul of animation, so on, even we had already decided the final concept of this animation, our progress slowed to a halt due to style issues, so it was necessary for us to make concessions, after a long discussion, we finally decided that we would have one person for each part so that there would be no stylistic fragmentation throughout the film and there would be more layers in the film. I was responsible for the background and animals, and Lily was responsible for the character and some storyboards. However, we ran into new problems as the process progressed, we met offline after we had drawn our animations and it turned out that these videos did not work together as we expected when we edited them, each separate video looks great but it was hard to combine them together, and we realized that was our communication issues, we did not communicate too much while we were drawing and we got a strong fragmentation on frames, so we did a lot of changes on the frames that we already done, cut few frames that influence the look of the film and added some new frames to make the film looks more soft and made them match each other better while editing. But the most challenging part of this part is that we all had different vision on our work, and this caused a serious problem that we could not be satisfied with others’ work and we almost fell out over it, we talked about one thing and she did another thing but so did I, nothing will change if we kept staying in this condition, more gumption should be spent on discussing, we need a right and clear direction, so we insist on working face to face in order to deal with unnecessary negatives because we can deal with them beforehand in the process of work. 
 
About drawing. I focused on the natural scenery, I tried to bring the beauty of the nature into my work. Powerful storms hit the towering snow mountains, the ground is a thick layer of snow, no excess color and life, only dangerous, cold and death, but when the sun is going down, the warm orange glow of the setting, and the light on the ground of forest reflects off the deer, this is the world of dreams and what the old man saw as he lay dying. Overall, I think this is a great experience, in the past, I seldom work with others, but this project gives me a opportunity to feel cooperation and I faced a lot of problems that I have not faced before, we communicate with partner, we do concessions, all of those will be a improvement for me.
our storyboards
Lily was responsible for the character and this is the character she designed.
some scenes that I drew
This is our process, we edited this film in the Videoleap
Here are some screen shot of the final film.
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