The making of The Fall
Yiran Guo
Thesis Book
2017
A film by Yiran Guo
To begin with
The idea begins with the mood board that I made for my self-directed project. I tried visualizing everything that I like through a mood board. By arranging the images together, I realized that I was always fascinated by the things that are unreal or dramatic. I am interested in experimental Japanese shows, as well as underground cult films. I like the strange and instinct environment those films and shows create. I started to remember that since I was very young, I have frequently imagined that magical things were around me. I enjoy the imaginary world I create and always try to merge it into my works in some way. That’s how I developed my dream idea. Dreams are always spontaneous and make no sense. The surrealism they create is strange but beautiful.
Using dreams as a thematic form perfectly matched the blurred story and mixed feelings that I want to create. After I read some dream theories, I began to understand how dreams combine the irrational illusion and the human subconscious at the same time. Keeping the idea of dreams in mind, I started to think about the way that I am going to tell the story.
Dreams are all about our conscious and subconscious, our memory and imagination. When these elements come together within a very short time, everything will be condensed and seem chaotic. But after all represent the true desire of oneself.
During the summer before thesis year, I started experimenting with traditional ways of making animation. I made gifs by frequently changing frames with watercolors. I found that the illusion of changing backgrounds evokes the same dizzy feeling as a dream creates, so I kept this method and decided to make an animation to mimic the dream that I wanted to show.
As my self-directed project started with a story based on a young girl’s dream, I decided to make the animation a continuing story based on that. The dream follows the memories and the fears of the girl towards a sad romantic conclusion. I started to think about a story represent the emotion of a girl yet not showing the specific memory of her.
Coming up with the story was the hardest part of the process. I struggled to decide between nonnarrative and linear ways of storytelling. I wanted to represent a dream that is as close to the experience of a real dream as possible, but at the same time, I wanted to make a dream based on a real character that could be understood by other people. I kept going back and forth, based on my understanding of dreams and my own memories of dreams.
In the end, I came up with a non-narrative dream by a girl, loosely based on my own experience of nightmare and memories. The girl walking through different places and trapped by an imaginary space.
“Falling” can be interpreted as the anxious and deep fear of a person in traditional Chinese fortune telling. I borrowed that interpretation for my animation. The movement of falling is a metaphor to represent the anxiety of the character. The multiple times of falling represent her descent into the deeper dream. I didn’t explain that she is either scared or nervous from this dream, because in dreams, you cannot fully understand of what happening around you. You may also be unaware of the deep emotion you may have as a result of not understanding. The dream is all about her memories from daily life. Some of her dream may represent her fear but what she sees is mostly a mix of different elements from her memories. I created a structure for my animation that is an imaginary space looks like a room, but does not exactly exist as a room. I created four aspects that the character can walk through, that look like the four wall of a room. She falls on the floor from the ceiling several times. Each movement of falling can be interpreted as the girl traveling into a deeper dream.
I added slightly more color as the girl goes into deeper dream andcreated the very color overwhelming environment to represent the craziness and dizziness of the dream. Besides the movement of falling, I tried to add more bizarre actions, like riding on top of a ball that later changes into a face, into the animation to represent the potential desires and mixed feelings of the girl.
I use many of my own memories and fears to form this dream. I’ve always feared the dramatic figure, the joker, from Chinese operas and the traditional instrument the joker uses during funerals. I combined all the elements of my imagination and memory together to form this intense dream, such as the classroom that she falls into naked, and a spinning head that comes from nowhere. All the imagery aims to form a bizarre space that doesn’t exist but can represent her feelings and desires.
The traditional rotoscoping way of making animation is really perfect for this project, as I draw frame by frame, rotoscoping allows me to create a very colorful, intense environment with frequently changing backgrounds.
People may have a hard time understanding what’s going on, but that is actually the nature of dreams. People wake up from their dreams and are not fully aware of what was happening. They sense a very blurry feeling or memory. I replicated that effect for the part of the story when she falls into the deeper dream. Everything becomes more colorful in an intense way.
I experimented with different media including acrylic, watercolor, and colored pencils, and layered them to create some interesting and unexpected effects.
By accident, I found out that it is more interesting and better related to the dream when I put the videos side by side with different timing. I like how the images were different but also connected with each other. They can be interpreted either as part of the same dream, or as different dreams happening at different times. Placing them side by side makes the effect more chaotic and hard to understand immediately. That is also what I wanted to mimic about dreams. People can barely tell what happened through their dream, but the scenes in the dream will feel familiar because the same imagery recurs.
The longer format of side-by-side imagery allowed me to create a larger space. The girl looked smaller when I put her in the middle of the frame, but she kept changing and transformed into the other characters, which simulated the fact that people cannot identify themselves in their own dreams., They sometimes will look at themselves as another person. So I made her change into other characters, even the ones she was afraid of.
The deeper into the dream she goes, the harder it becomes to distinguish between her dream and reality. In order to achieve that effect, I used both the traditional rotoscoping animation to mimic the real-life movement, and stop-motion animation for create the realistic depth of the space.
It was a fun process for me to try different ways of making the animation. I loved the unexpected effect that results from using the different tools and methods. For creating the depth of the space, I was using transparent paper and shooting with stop-motion to create different layers.
For the show, I tried to move the environment of the animation into a real-life space. I used the objects that I have in the animation and produced bigger versions of them in order to fill the whole space.
I create a dreamy and bizarre world along with the animation, trying to blur the dream and reality. I hung all the balloons and also painted some of them to mimic the faces and imagery that exist in my animation.
Moving On...
My thesis animation is one of the most challenging projects I have ever made, as this is the first time I attempted making an animation. Many unexpected problems arose during the process but also some unexpected surprises, too. I loved the experience of working with new tools and media, since I always try to tell stories in a different way. For the next step, I will keep applying my personal style to my work with new forms of media. I will experiment more with video and see how that the intersection between video and illustration allows allows me to combine my aesthetics with mixed media.
Thank You
Illustrstion Practice MFA, Maryland Institute College of Art yiranguoart.com / yguoeva@gmail.com