Artwork by me ( @akkurara)
Self-Inflicted Achromatic
The Synopsis
Self-Inflicted Achromatic, translated as ' self-inflicted colorlessness'. Official description as "Necessary evil, how one appears, what people really
wanted to be." The story basically follows the mindset of a boy who appears to be stuck as a severe social outcast, and has problems trying to match with this world and constantly thinks of disappearing. But as long as there is one person who smiles and him and cares for him, all his reasons to leave vanish and he is willing to stay for the sake of that person.
The Mood board
The film will be divided into two color schemes, " The Blue Period" by Pablo Picasso showing melancholy and sadness, and " Yellow" theme depicting optimism, love and care. Therefore I created two moodboards to match with the themes
The Storyboard:
Treatment and Execution
As already mentioned previously, all of the short film is in
2D animation, drawn by hand. Each and every single artwork and text seen on the
screen is drawn and animated by me, on my iPad Pro, with an Apple Pencil (2nd
generation). The software I used for all my drawings, is the one I generally
use for all my other personal art and commissions as well, called Procreate. There
are many aspects of the film’s production and execution that I would like to
point out.
1)
Color Scheme : Throughout almost half of the
film, the main character is shown in bluish monochromatic colors to indicate
his misery and self-doubt, however, towards the end, as our other main
character is introduced, the color scheme shifts to more yellow and orange,
depicting hope and happiness. Right at the ending of the video, the last frame
is the protagonist getting engulfed in yellow color, which shows the transition
of his heart. It is also one of my personal favorite shots from the entire
film.
2)
Art Style: Compared to my usual drawing art
style which is sketchy and softer, I used harder and sharper outlines for
almost all the illustrations used in this. The reason why I used sharper lines
was to embed more chaos and uncertainty towards the first part of the video,
and to have a choppy moving style towards the latter half.
3)
Animation Key frames: The entire film consists
of illustrations that have less key frames which ultimately limits the
animations. The reason I did this was because I was going for a more “animatic”
style of illustrating rather than “animation”. By “animatic”, what I basically mean is that I
wanted to create a preliminary version of a film, produced by drawing only
successive sections of a storyboard and adding a soundtrack. As the genre of
our film is experimental and we have creative freedom to pick how we produce
and display our content, I found the use of selective illustrations and the
idea of a preliminary video more unconventional. Therefore, this is why the film consists of
more still frames than smoother animations.
4)
The Music: To many, upon first hearing, my film
would seem more like a ‘ music video’, but once again I would like to point out
that we had our creative freedom with the choice of sound design and I chose my
film to have a constant song playing at the back because I believe it felt more
suited for a film that consisted animations and drawings. If I were to shoot my
film from my camera, I would have certainly used many ambient sounds to bring
out a stronger vision and story through sound as it is hard to do so from
camera. But since my film is animated, I believe it already captures the visual
and abstract elements that are somewhat harder to do so with camera. That is
why I used a full song as the background music, to give it a 2D animated
self-drawn music vibe I was hoping for
1)
Narration: The narration in the film is voiced
by me. It appears at the start of the video, and abruptly appears in the middle
as well, to show the chain of thoughts alongside visuals. The quotes narrated in
these voiceovers are from the book “ No Longer Human”, written by Dazai Osamu,
who is one of my most favorite Japanese authors.
Equipment:
Process
The screenshots of my drawing process are as follows:
Since it was hard for me to transfer all my artworks and illustrations frame by frame to laptop, all the editing is done on the ipad.
Sound Design:
The song I chose for my film is called " Self-Inflicted Achromatic" by MafuMafu, which is also the name of my film as well. Other than that, some ambient sounds are used such as the storm and windy effect at the back if narration during the beginning, and the clicking film sounds during the start and end of narrations. These are copyright free sounds. All the narration in the film is voiced and recorded by me.
Difficulties faced during process:
One of the biggest difficulties I faced during the creation of this film is of course, the animation part. Initially, I was hoping to do a video that showed full 4-5 second animations throughout, but I later changed the idea to an ' animatic' approach, where I would just create series of images played in a sequence with a soundtrack. An animated storyboard, perhaps. This suited the idea of the film more and seemed more unconventional to me, that is why I went along with it. However, I still faced some difficulty during the drawing part of the process. I wish I had more time to work on the drawings because I wanted to make them more smoother and detailed than they are as of now. I feel like, compared to my classmates, I have to work even harder, given that my entire choice of production is different from theirs. Drawing is a very time consuming process; I'm often told by my classmates that animating and drawing makes things easier for me- and I have to strongly disagree that. The whole drawing and illustrating process of this project alone took more than two weeks. During this time I was constantly drawing all the time with no breaks, whilst working on my other final submissions. So, I feel like I overworked quite a lot during this process as there were days where I would go on pulling all nighters while illustrating and just drawing on my iPad, and such long intervals of sharp screen times are always hard to cope, especially when you're constantly concentrating and thinking too. So I'd say, It does saturate you. A lot. But I have always loved the end results of my works and I'm glad I could at least finish this project under the given time and meeting the deadline precisely.
Another difficulty faced during the creation was, the Holy Month of Ramadan, along with Covid. Since during Ramadan, all Muslims are fasting, It was quite difficult to work outside home, keeping in mind the risk of Covid-19 as well. This is one the reasons I decided to draw my entire project; so I would not have to worry about outdoor filming and connecting with people.
Self-Evaluation:
Strength(s)
If I had to point out the satisfactory parts of the film, the first one I'd definitely say is the idea making. The entire story and metaphorization of the self-inflicted achromatic is a very important concept to me, as there have been times I have personally experienced the feelings felt by the main character. Due to the topic being quite close to me, I feel like I did a good job depicting what I actually had in mind for the scenes, and I'm happy It turned out relatively similar to the version I had in my head.
Another thing I would like to comment on is the overall color palette and artstyle. As mentioned previously in the research part of the blog, the color scheme is inspired by Picasso's Blue Period, and I find it really admirable and interesting that I was able to create art with his color palette. I also like the pacing of the film, even though it is close to 4 minutes, I feel like the visual elements and illustrations of the film are good enough to keep one's eyes onto it without getting bored.
Weakness(es)
I think, the biggest drawback for me was the time. As I had started working on the video in under 2 weeks, there was a lot of pressure since I had to draw a lot, which took days and nights of continuous overwork. This also limited my ability to come up with better and detailed animations. So time management was definitely an issue but also an eye opener, and I have now learned to leave almost 1 month time gap between my drawing projects, seeing how overwhelming it can get.
Another thing is, the narration. I feel like, even though the narration parts of the film add an amazing touch to the story, I now feel like I somehow dragged them to a point that they became a bit monotonous. Even though these quotations are by one of my favorite writers ever, I think the pace would have matched more If I had kept the sentences shorter.
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