Major Post 07 – Favourite Disney Princess Movie

Posted on by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle

When talking about Walt Disney Studio, Mickey Mouse is definitely the first one to come in mind with but other than Mickey Mouse, I am sure everyone got a childhood shared with classic princess movie too. The very first and successful movie is Snow White, that have showed a bit of its clip in class, Is Snow White your favourite one among all the princess movie that Disney has? If not, what is your favourite one?

I don’t like Snow White because the story feels boring to me. Snow White is a very good movie at that time without computer animation but the story in general, I am not interested. My favourite movie is Beauty and the Beast. I love animals and monsters, also fantasy. I don’t like an ordinary romance so the story of Beauty and the Beast caught my interest the most since I was young until now. The live action one in 2017 is very well-done too, I almost teared for I found my childhood memories back when I was in the cinema.

The story of Beauty and the Beast is about the romance between Bella and Beast, who was originally a handsome prince, master of the castle. Beast was cursed for being a selfish and cruel prince he was. Beast imprisoned Bella’s father for stealing a rose from his garden for Bella. Bella then went out to look for her father. She offered to stay in the castle in returns of her father’s freedom. Thus the relationship in between began, Bella slowly turned Beast back to be a good prince that he should have been. The curse that Beast had can only broke by a kiss of true love so Beast tried to approach to Bella no matter how hard that is.

I just really adore the story. It is out of reality, this is why I love it. Reality is boring and fixed. Disney movies gave me an opportunities to step into their fantasy world, helping me to escape the stressful reality.

Major Post 06 – Ferdinand the Bull

Posted on by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle

Ferdinand the Bull is a short film produced by Walt Disney and brought into the cinema in 25th November, 1938 which also won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Movie in 1938. Ferdinand’s Mother is voiced by Walt Disney himself and Ferdinand is voiced by animator Milt Kahl. The short film is narrated by Don Wilson. It is based on the 1936 published children’s book “The Story of Ferdinand”, on of the most successful children books of all times.

The plot started to talk about when Ferdinand was a cattle, unlike the other playful active cattle bulls who would jump around, bumping their head to each other, he just loved to sit under the shade of a tree quietly, smelling flowers. His mother suggested him to play with the other bulls but he refused and stated that he is happy in the way like this. Ferdinand grew up to be the biggest and strongest bull in the herd who still loved sitting down quietly and smelling flowers while the other bulls hoped to be the bull in a bullfight.

One day, five men came for a strong bull to be in the bullfight. While the other bulls showed off how tough they were, Ferdinand was still enjoying himself quietly under the shade. The five men were not satisfied to the bulls . Later, Ferdinand was stung by a bee. In a panic, Ferdinand was running through everything like if he was crazy. The five men were impressed by him so they took him to the bullfight.

The Banderilleros, the Picadores and the matador arrived to the arena. A lady gave the matador flowers. This led Ferdinand to run to him. Everyone was panicking and afraid but when the Ferdinand just sat down and smelled the flower, everyone was disappointed, the Banderilleros were mad, the Picadores were madder, and the matador was so especially mad. The matador tried so hard to make Ferdinand mad and fight with him but failed in the end. Ferdinand was sent back to his home. The animation ended with Ferdinand sitting on his favourite place, smelling flowers.

Major Post 05 – Tom and Jerry

Posted on by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle

Though I like watching Disney’s animation and Looney Toons, Tom and Jerry is my favourite TV show since I was young. Same as the other two, Tom and Jerry is a animated series of comedy short films. It is created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera in 1940 under the name of MGM cartoon studio. The main characters are Tom, the cat, and Jerry, the mouse. The shorts are mainly talking about the rivalry between them, inspired in real life at that time that cats were kept for catching mice. Each short usually center on Tom’s numerous attempts to catch Jerry and the mayhem and destruction that follows behind. The ending usually depicted Tom’s another failed attempt to catch Jerry because of Jerry’s cleverness, skilled abilities to escape and luck. However sometimes, the show depicted Tom and Jerry together to solve issues or have interactions with other characters, a friendship between Tom and Jerry sometimes being told too.

Not only the plots are fun to watch, the music plays a big role in the show too. The newer spin-offs of the show has less music and with more dialogues of the characters other than Tom and Jerry which I really don’t like about, probably because I lived my childhood with them not talking but it is just my personal opinion. The original show didn’t have too much dialogues in them. The whole show is driven by musics and sounds, like the most old animations we have watched in class. Even though it is an American show, as a kid, I could still understand what happened in general and enjoyed the laughter it gave to me. I am a grown-up now but whenever I get a chance to watch an episode again, it is still enjoyable to watch. I think this is a key as a successful cartoon : Never get bored and memorable.

Is Tom and Jerry your childhood cartoon show too?

Major Post 04 – Nick Park

Posted on by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle

Nick Park is an English animator, director and a writer. His famous works are stop motion animation : Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts and Shaun the Sheep. He also won a lot of Academy Award with Creature Comforts, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. He also received five BAFTA Awards, including one award for Best Short Animation for A Matter of Loaf and Death.

I found Creature Comforts the most interesting one. It is one of the stop motion clay animation made by Nick Park in 1989. They are animated comedy shorts. Basically, the studio will go interview some non-actors questions. The answers they have will be put into animals and match to the lip syc so it gives a feeling that the creatures are taking an interview from us. They have a lot of new versions of this series. The original and the first one of Creature Comforts is an interview to the animals from a zoo, talking about their current home conditions. The non actors were interviewed to talk about their home conditions. They are the residents of both a housing estate and old people’s home. After recording the voices, Nick started to fit the voices into different animals so the short animation is created.

They have a youtube channel for the new series of Creature Comforts. It is sometimes pretty sad and cute. They are very stylized, very easy to recognize.

Major Post 03 – Interaction with Audience from Disney

Posted on by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle

When Professor Jake talked about Fantasia from Disney, I misunderstood as the other one that I love watching which is also made by Disney. I found myself often messed this one up with Fantasia.
The one music video or a show that I am talking about is Mickey’s PhilharMagic. The animation is created for a show in Disneyland. I love this animation when I was a little girl. Even though it is a computer animation, I do still find some old fashion taste from the old animations showed in class. The whole animation is driven by music. A lot of the content in between is basically scenes and songs from the classic animated Disney animated movie but are remade for dramatic effects and interaction with Donald Duck. The consideration of the characters in it will interact with the audience is what makes me remind of the animations showed in class. Remembering there are scenes when the characters were doing something or talking but they were actually talking to us, the audience.
For example, Hell-Bent for Election (1944), directed by Chuck Jones. There is the scene of the short man in suit, he was being frustrated and transformed into Hitler. He then was embarrassed and returned back to himself. This is a symbolic movement of the animation but have you ever think of who is he embarrassed to? Us, the audience because in any animations, we are watching the story goes on in god mode, we know a lot more than the characters in it. If you think about it, from the old animations, the characters sometimes interacted with the audience to create a sense of humor that makes us laugh.

I do not have a proper link to watch it in the best quality because it is a show in Disneyland. No one got the original video, it is best to watch it in person but you have to pay to watch this.
This is the one I think it got the best quality to watch it.
If I remembered it correctly and they still haven’t remove it, this can be watched in Disneyland Hong Kong too.

Major Post 02 – Kubo and The Two Strings

Posted on by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle

In the old days, people made animation frame by frame. They have to draw all the actions one by one on the frames so that they can show them on screen. Nowadays it is much easier to create animation with all the help from software. While it does not seems to be old fashioned anymore, stop motion animation is still being created.
Stop motion animation has been around for centuries because it is one of the first generation of how an animation can be created. Making puppets and props are a extra process of the creation. Not only the one single character puppet has to be made, the expressions of characters, a LOT of props, the environment, a lot more to be considered based on how the story goes, will something break through the story, will someone transform, the process of transformation. In 2D and 3D animation, you can copy and paste on the next scenes, editing from there, saving time but in stop motion, you have to make everything that are needed for the production.

I am here to share my favourite stop motion movie so far – Kubo and The Two Strings. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to watch this movie in the cinema, I watched it from a website, I regret it so much. I love this movie no matter what but the feeling of watching it on the big screen will be epic.

The story is talking about a boy named Kubo. Kubo is a boy who has magical power. Everyday, he will go to the village and tell stories of his father, the almighty samurai, Hanzo with his shamisen(a Japanese instrument) and magical origami figures. He has a mother who has a deteriorating mental state. He was told not to stay out at night for the moon king will find him. However, one day he failed to reach home before the moon rises. He got attacked by a pair of sisters who introduced as his mother’s siblings. His mother saved him and sent him away, left alone to face her sisters.
Kubo woke up with a new ally, Monkey. Not long after he met Beetle with no memory. The three of them have to go on a journey to find the 3 legendary items, Sword Unbreakable, Breastplate and Helmet Invulnerable Impenetrable, in order to defeat the Moon King. Throughout this long journey, Kubo also discovered that Monkey was the reincarnated spirit of his mother and Beetle was his father who got cursed from falling in love with Kubo’s mother. Kubo was protected once again by his parents, his father and mother were killed in the end.
The Moon King appeared in front of Kubo and offered to give him immortality. Kugo refused so he started the epic fight with the Moon King who later transformed into a Moon Beast. In the end, he used the ultimate magic, Love and Memories to defeat the Moon King.

I highly recommend to watch this movie, it is still the best one I have watched so far. I adore the style of designing and the whole concept, they are very unique. The process of production is incredible too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vex0gPFnBvM

WIP post – Project 2 Cutout Animation

Posted on by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle

For project 2, we continued working with animal characters. This time we have two characters : a kitty and a doggy. We have already did death scenes in the last project so this time we wanted our animation to be peaceful and cheerful.
Here is our first story plot : A kitty is playing with a ball, the ball then hits softly at a dog’s nose. The dog looks scary and evil but turns out to be a very friendly dog and plays with the kitty. The kitty cuddles the dog in the end.

First storyboard

We were shopping in the stationary shop for color papers for this project. We found something extra and interesting : Washi (Japanese paper).
We then discussed about adding this paper into our project. We remembered that Professor Jake mentioned that our characters from last project were not symbolic enough to stand out in the animation. We usedthis suggestion into our project 2.

Normal color papers : Objects(Ball, sun, grass, bushes, flowers)
Washi (Japanese Paper) : Characters (Kitty and dog)

We thought even further to make sure everything is settled for making and shooting. We added a final tool for our cutout animations. Since we have thin papers, to prevent them from flying off the scene, we pasted them on plastic pads so that we can create puppets and made them a little popped up from the scene.

Here is the final props we have for the project.

Here is some of the sneak peak of our animation :

Made by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle and Jiawan Tan

Project 1 – Object Animation WIP by Janelle and Tan

Posted on by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle

After seeing the assignment, it immediately brought memories back from my younger self. Talking about object movement, it was my all-time favourite thing to play with. I loved playing with toys, role-playing each characters and creating stories. During class before, I used to love playing with my stationary on the classroom desk. Every movement that I did to the pens, rubber, ruler and stapler are scenes of a story in my head, it is like watching a tiny movie with myself.

Therefore, I suggested a very short story with stationary so we did it. The story we chose is simply a knight slayed a monster. Here is our “actors”.

Random stationary + random objects we have

Characters:
USB and a Lipstick : Victims
Rubber : A Knight
Pegasus Toy : Royal ride of the Knight
Scissors : A Sword of the Knight
Random Stationary and An Apple Charge Wire : The Evil Monster

We first decided to use the scissors as the head of the monster because it looks dangerous, fitting the theme of a monster but after a few discussion, we decided to use the scissors as the sword of the knight and replaced the head with a stapler because the scissors actually have a cover which is similar to a sword, as for the stapler, it is much more easier to work with.

Originally, we only decided on the knight slaying a monster as the story. We wanted to add a clear opening and ending so we added victims, a quick reason for the knight to slay the monster and the monster is dead in the end.

We had a trouble of shooting this because I forgot to bring a phone holder for the assignment so we spent a little bit of time to find a way to hold the phone. We went to an empty room to shoot this and hold the phone with the two tables.

The finale when we are done shooting

One of the frame

One of the frame

Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle
Jiawan Tan

Major Post 01

Posted on by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle

A long time ago, I saw a clip of A Trip To The Moon showing on the TV. Later I found that the movie name was named Hugo. It caught my interest but that was the semi-ending part of the movie so I went ahead to watch this again on my computer. Until recently, I knew my mistake on thinking that A Trip To The Moon was just a part of the movie Hugo, it was a stand-alone animation from the old times, one of the very first animation.

Hugo is a historical adventure drama film, directed and produced by Martin Scorsese. The story is talking about a boy who lived in the Gare Montparnasse railway station in Paris in the 1930s. His clockmaker father found a broken automaton at the museum. He and Hugo tried to repair it, documenting everything about it in a notebook. Unfortunately his father died in a fire. Hugo continued to repair the automaton, believing it contained a message from his father. The final piece he needed was a heart-shaped key. In the station, he met Isabelle who would like to go on an adventure with Hugo and later was found wearing a heart-shaped key. When the automaton activated, it drew a famous scene of A Trip To The Moon, reviewing that Isabelle’s godfather, Georges Méliès was a film maker but gave up after the effect of WW1. Hugo and Isabelle went on a quest to hopefully find a way to invigorate Georges.

Hugo film

Pre-Quarter Assignment

Posted on by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle

I used to play around in DeviantArt. There, I found one of my favourite illustration artist, NukeRooster. He is an artist who focused on painting creatures digitally. I am also a creature artist so I am fascinated on how he paints, the gestures and the textures on his creatures. He successfully caught every details that a creature should have, granting it a realistic kind of feeling. I am often inspired by his style of art and how he drew his creatures, not only the painting style but also helps me to learn on shapes of creatures. His creativity blew my mind when I saw his commission works at first sight. He would take commissions on designing creatures for the clients, at the end the creatures designed by him will be owned by the client. This commissions work like a pet shop. His creations are mind-blowing. He encouraged me to push even further to improve myself and someday, I hope to become someone as great as he is.
(He is inactive in dA now, I found that he is more active in Tumblr.)

https://www.deviantart.com/nukerooster/

https://nukerooster.tumblr.com/

These are my favourite drawings from him. 

^ My all-time favourite one ^