Jingyi Yu
The theme of my project is The Cage. It's a one-minute, 20-second short film to tell people not to keep birds in cages.
About
When birds are kept in cages, they gradually lose the ability to fly and hunt. The loss of birds will greatly damage the ecological balance, and will seriously affect the production of forestry and agriculture.
When came up with this script, I hope people can have a deeper understanding of the feelings of birds imprisoned in cages. So I created the character of a little boy, and in the story, the little boy would be locked in a cage like a bird, and he would be terrified. The viewer can put themselves in the bird's situation through the eyes of the boy.
In designing the image of the boy, I made reference to some images of little boys in the country in the 18th century. When mapping the boy's skin, I added some light pink to the original skin tone, at the joints, nose and cheeks to make him look more vivid. I chose rough fabric as the material for the boy's clothes, which is more in line with the image of the boy who likes to climb trees and play in the wild.
These are my design for the image of a little boy in Sketchbook. When designing the TROLL image, I also refer to a lot of trolls on the internet. They usually have long arms and stubby lower legs and a large belly, and their clothes are often very simple.
The first scene takes place in the woods, I watched tutorials to build a big tree, which was detailed considering that the little boy would sit on it all the time in the first scene. Then I added a lot of plants to the woods, which were kind of rough because they were just background. Then I did the lighting design for the forest scene. I wanted to create the atmosphere of the morning sun hitting the ground through the leaves, so I created some light fog. The boy and bird models were imported into the scene to check whether the character's colour scheme was in harmony with the scene. I am satisfied with the result.
In my vision, I wanted the light at dusk to make the shadow of the little boy very long, so I drew this concept drawing.
When the boy wakes up from the nightmare, he is still panicky, but when he realizes that it was just a dream, his mood will calm down and he will release the bird. To enhance the contrast between the two emotions, I wanted to make more changes in the tone and background sounds. So I ran some more lighting tests. I first divided the lighting into cool colours and warm colours. In the cool colours, I tested different colours such as blue and purple and blue and green respectively. Finally, I chose this blue colour with a bit of purple under the teacher's suggestion.
The kid sitting in a cage
In the warm tones, I also ran some tests with pink, yellow and green tones. At last, under the teacher's suggestion, I chose the warm colour of the pink.
The kid opened the cage.
The Cage
Final output