Canada Line Project WIP journal (Nov.2nd)

It took about three weeks before some solid ideas for the Canada Line Project were settled down. Meanwhile, we, as a class, has generated many random ideas regarding this project. So far, the class is divided into three groups working on topics including: the other worlds, hallucination, and group sociology. Two weeks ago, I joined team the other worlds. The original idea coming from the group from the first discussion was that there would be a dramatic transformation happening from a daily, normal scene, such as on a sky train ride. What should we create for the dramatic transformation became our first problem. People have had conflicts and debates amongst the group that what would the transformation be like. Some choose stories involving fantasy, such as human-like animals and vegetables, giant bread train station, bread train, and roller-coaster train. Some suggested that if we were too much involved with fantasies, the theme could be confused with the other team who worked on hallucination. One of our team members, Omar, then strongly suggested that we should go with a scene that would be more connected to people zoning out, rather than having overwhelming creatures or objects. Yet, even when we tried hard to compress our ideas down, there were about five animatics from the team members, and there are people who were very keen to their ideas with no compromise for mixing the stories from the others, which was totally understandable, too. As a result, we pitched our ideas through those animatics during last week, and received feedbacks about further compressing and mixing the story down.

Team group sociology decided to do a bunch of animals chat to each other and turning into the same kind of animal when all of them sensed the existence of an unknown creature. Team hallucination was being very innovative and creative that they had a more abstract approach on doing masking tape animation on glass window. The story-line for team hallucination was unclear, but the random images were definitely appealing. What our group did for last week for mixing each other's story, thanks to Cody, another great team member from our group, was that the passengers on the sky-train would fall over when they zone out, and they would fall in a world full of natural elements. I think if we could keep going with this story, we would have a very easy time connected to team group sociology. For instance, since the other team wants to do animal sociology, we could let our passengers fall on the ground and become the animals, or we could let our fallen passengers became the reason of the transformation and assimilation of the animals from the other team. When the story passes to team group sociology, we could create the third video bridges the gap between group sociology and team hallucination. I would suggest to put the work from team hallucination as the last piece to conclude all previous three pieces, simply because the unique nature and experimental quality of the work from team hallucination. As for the third bridging piece, my suggestion is we could create a piece making the animal-like characters turn their interest to the passing skytrain, and they tried to get on the train again. From there they could somehow become part of the animation on the skytrain glass window.

 As an individual, I like character animation and puppet making. I think puppet creating and puppet animation are things that I am really interested in. I would like to have further chance to develop the knowledge and technique for that field. I also like to apply natural elements in my work, and I did some character design for the group presentation before using prototypes like animals and vegetables. For the latest version of our group animatic, I am not sure if we would still keep the natural elements. I am perfectly fine with staying with my current team. The idea of the other world is quite interesting to me. I am also more than willing to offer my help to the other teams if there is a need. So far there are a some character design, concept art and some animation tests I did based on my own interest and practice for this project. If people could find any usage of these ideas being applied for a broader scale, that would be great. Otherwise I will just keep working within the team while building my knowledge and interest from further research. Below are the images and animation test. The animation test was generated based on the natural animals idea, and the puppets and sets are build up from leaves and found project. Hope you would also enjoy.