Red Thread
SHARON LEE
FANI7010: Animation Production 15/16
Story Development Since I came alone from Taiwan to the UK for studying, I realised the culture difference between two countries. For some reasons, I feel I should probably do something about Taiwanese culture. I started to think about what is our own culture. For some foreigners who lives in Taiwan feel Taiwanese don’t have very clear cultural features, and we are lack of being proud of our identities. Recently, more and more Taiwanese concern about our culture heritage preservation. Taiwanese culture was influenced by Qing Dynasty, Japan, and western countries. My first idea was to do an animated documentary which is talking about my grandmother’s memory. She lived in a huge different timing from us. She lived across the era from Taiwan being a colony of Japan to Nationalist government. However, after doing more research of Taiwanese history, I found out my grandmother’s story is not enough to elaborate my idea clearly , so I decided to combined several local Taiwanese stories.
My purpose of this animated documentary is to record our history and document the history in different medium—Animated Documentary. The goal of my film is that I hope Taiwanese would be willing to understand deeply of our own culture and be proud of being a Taiwanese. For foreigner, I hope they could understand more about what is Taiwan and have interest in Taiwanese history and culture.
The following sketches are some stories I collected from books, interviews, and documentaries.
During Qing Dynasty, opium was popular in Taiwan, but it was forbidden during Japanese colonial period.
During Japanese colonial period, Taiwanese wanted to become a truly Japanese to get more respect and better life quality. Therefore, Taiwanese pursued Japanese culture like changing outfit and hairstyle.
Japanese police held power to put down Taiwanese local workers and farmers.
After World War II, there were too many orphans who could not get enough food in orphanage. In one of the orphanage which was under National Revolutionary Army, people used one litre of milk to make steam breads to feed more children instead of drinking.
During the war time, people used rice sacks as materials to make trousers.
About 1950s to 1960s, Taiwanese started to admire American culture; western dancing was popular in social events.
Taiwanese was very disappointed about the low administrative efficiency of Nationalist government; Taiwanese describe them as livestock.
Story Development For further research, I have read some books which were written during 1920s to 1970s. The books ‘Orphan of Asia’ and ‘Potsdam Section Chief ’ were written by Wu, Zhuoliu, which inspired me to write my story. These two books inspired me to think about Taiwanese identity during different certain situations. I could see Taiwanese were struggling about being a Chinese, Japanese, Mainlander, Islander or pursuing western culture. For my story, I combined true stories and interviews I have collected and wrote it to a narrative story. I named my film as ‘Red Thread’; red thread is a metaphor throughout this film as a direction to guide the main character to find what is his identity. Red thread will only appear when the main character feel lost.
Orphan of Asia, Wu Zhuoliu, 1946
Potsdam Section Chief, 1948
Production Colour Testing Since I wanted to challenge myself to do traditional drawing animation on paper which I have not done it before, I decided to draw watercolour animation. The first result I felt it is too colourful and too bright for my film. Hence, I edited it to black and white in photoshop and composited it with black thread. However, I don’t want my film is only mono tone, so I also added some blue and red tones to make image looks more interesting. At the end, because I am doing black and white film, I decided to use Chinese ink to draw instead of watercolour.
Watercolour on paper
Colour Testing
Watercolour on paper, Photoshop
Watercolour on paper, Photoshop
Line Testing At the first time, I didn’t count the frames correctly, and it didn’t look well. Therefore, I added some frames to make it smoother and adjusted speed in After effects. Besides. I have made a list of every shots to check how much work I have to finish.
Shot9- 1
Shot9- 4
Shot9- 2
Shot9- 5
Shot9- 3
Shot9- 6
Shot9- 7
Shot9- 8 (Extra)
Shot9- 9 (Extra)
Shot9- 10 (Extra)
Shot8- 1
Shot8- 2
Shot8- 3
Shot8- 4
Shot8- 5
Shot8- 6
Shot8- 7
Shot8- 8
Shot8- 9 (Extra)
Shot8- 10 (Extra)
Shot8- 11 (Extra)
Shot8- 12 (Extra)
Shot8- 13 (Extra)
Shot List
Shot List - 1
Shot List - 2
Shot List -3
Embroidery It was my first time to use sewing machine and I didn’t know how to do free-motion embroidery, so I spent some time on testing sewing machine. After several practices, I could handle sewing machine pretty well now and I quite happy with the result.
Shot8- 1
Shot8- 2
Shot8- 3
Shot7- 2
Shot8- 5
Shot8- 7
Shot8- 1
Shot7- 2
Shot7- 5
Shot7- 7
Shot7- 9
Shot8- 2 Shot14
Stop motion I have to point out that I spent most of my time on modifying this shot which is about Chinese and Japanese word characters mixing together. I tried to sew frame by frame at the first time, but it didn’t work well. Therefore, I decided to simply use thread stop-motion which I think it looks better.
Sewing frame by frame
Stop-motion
Stop motion
Frame 001
Frame 063
Frame 063
Frame 063
Frame 063
Storyboard Animatic When I finished my story, I assumed it will be 7 minutes long; fortunately, after I did my animatic, it’s 5 minutes. I did not have that much concern about my length when I did my first animatic. However, due to the progress I have only done 1 minutes and 10 seconds which does not reach the goal I planed it. I planed to finished 2 minutes good quality animation before 9th of May. Therefore, I have to find some way to make sure I could finish my film on time. I have already decided to reduce some of my thread work instead of cutting my film short. I plan to finish all my watercolour drawing and compositing first and then if I have time I will add some black thread outline on some watercolour drawing to give different texture feeling. Due to the huge amount of time I spent on embroidery stitches, I will only do some red thread stitch for some important shots and reduce the amount of work of black thread.
For voice over, aside from some interviews I did by myself, I have also collaborated with a national organisation called ‘Story Taiwan.’ They collect local Taiwanese stories and also encourage people to upload their own stories for documenting our history. I found quite a few suitable local stories could work with my film. However, it was not that easy to get people’s agreement to put their voices on my film. I have received several rejection, which means I have to find other stories that could work well with my film. Luckily, after several tries, I have already received some people’s agreement. Besides, I am also trying to collaborate with a documentary film which I am still contacting about the authorisation.
From Vida’s opinion, she suggested me to rearrange some voice over because there are some conflicts between images and voices. I agree with her opinion I also feel some part of voices do not match my animation images. Besides, since I received some rejection, I do have to change some voices. For my next step, I will rearrange my voice over first and keep working on animation production. Overall, I think I was too ambitious for creating such a complicated film. I will make my film simpler to focus more on my watercolour drawing and reduce the thread work.
001
002
003
004
005
006
007
008
009
010
011
012
013
014
015
016
017
018
019
020
021
022
023
024
025
026
027
028
029
030
031
032
033
034
035
036
037
038
039
040
041
042
043
044
045
046
047
048
049
050
051
052
053
054
055
056
057
058
059
060
061
062
063
064
065
066
067
068
069
070
071
072
073
074
075
076
077
078
079
080
081
082
083
084
085
086
SHARON LEE UCA FARNHAM 2016