My favorite animated film：
Ghost in the Shell (1995)

Concept

This 1995 anime science fiction film, based on the manga (Japanese style comics) by Masamune Shirow, is one of the most influential works in the animated film history. Ghost in the Shell follows Major Motoko Kusanagi-the cyborg squad leader of Section 9, the fictional division of the Japanese National Public Safety Commission. Major Kusanagi is on assignment to locate the mysterious “Puppet Master” who has hacked into a government official’s brain. “The overarching philosophical themes of the film include sex/gender identity and self-identity in a technologically advanced world. Ghost in the Shell was received positively by critics, who praised its visuals, which at the time were the most effective synthesis of traditional cel animation and CG animation. It has served as inspiration for filmmakers such as The Wachowskis.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell_(film))

Ghost in the shell film poster

Ghost in the shell manga cover

Design

For the film title design, as can be seen in the video above, “the title sequence to Ghost in the Shell is a curious mix of 8-bit type animation, then-hi-tech CGI, dreamy anime and naked torsos, all set to composer Kenji Kawai’s intimidating, minimalist score. It follows the construction of a cyborg from the inside out, first embracing a cold, tech-heavy aesthetic as the robot’s inner-core is assembled, feathering into softer imagery and warmer colors as the cyborg takes on a more human form, soon emerging from the mechanical womb as a young woman.”(http://www.artofthetitle.com/feature/the-inner-workings/)

And for the most significant character, Motoko Kusanagi, the character designer designed a more mature and serious Motoko than Masamune Shirow’s original portrayal of the character in the manga. Designer chose to depict a physically mature person to match Motoko's mental age, instead of the youthful appearance in the manga.

Motoko in film

Motoko in manga

In terms of scene design, when the film director Mamoru Oshii was looking for a model of the city of the future for his film, he turned to the cityscape of Hong Kong for his inspiration, because the city represented the theme of the film, the old and the new which exist in a strange relationship in an age of an information deluge.

（http://randomwire.com/recreating-ghost-in-hong-kong/）

The music (which used in the opening video above), composed by Kenji Kawai, included an ancient Japanese language in a wedding song that serves as a key piece of music leading up to the climax of the movie and serves to set the tone for the creation of a new type of lifeform.

Furthermore, the mechanical design is another highlight in Ghost in the Shell, such as vehicles, weapons, machines and electronic devices. These followed images are mechanical design sketches from my collections:

Edit/Animation

Ghost in the Shell used a novel process called “digitally generated animation” (DGA), which is a combination of cel animation, computer graphics (CG), and audio that is entered as digital data. In 1995, DGA was thought to be the future of animation, which mixed traditional animation with the emerging use of computer graphics, including digital cel work with visual displays. Editing was performed on an AVID system of Avid Technology, which was chosen because it was more versatile and less limiting than other methods and worked with the different types of media in a single environment.

The digital cel work included both original illustrations, compositions and manipulation with traditional cel animation to create a sense of depth and evoke emotion and feelings. Utilized as background, filters like a lens effect were used to create a sense of depth and motion, by distorting the front background and making the far background out of focus throughout the shot. Ghost in the Shell used a unique lighting system in which light and darkness were integrated into the cels with attention to light and shadow sources instead of using contrast to control the light. Hiromasa Ogura, the art director, described this as “a very unusual lighting technique.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell_(film))

Music video: Do the Evolution

Concept

This animated music video based on the song “Do the Evolution” from the American rock band Pearl Jam. It recounts the entire history of life on the earth, from the first cell appeared in ancient ocean, to the final world war which destroying the whole earth by humans. The main purpose of this video is to demonstrate the nature violence of human species. It was nominated for “Best Short Form Music Video” in the 41st Annual Grammy Awards, and named as “Best Video” in Rolling Stone Magazine’s Annual Readers Poll.

Design

This video was released in 1998, and it was co-directed by Kevin Altieri, known for his direction on Batman: The Animated Series, and Todd McFarlane, better known for his work with the popular comic book Spawn. As a result, the entire video strongly represents a kind of 1990s American animation style. The basic tone is dark, gloomy, although it is a colour animation.

                            Batman: The Animated Series by Kevin Altieri

(http://www.mbird.com/2012/05/batman-the-agony-of-loss-and-the-madness-of-desire-part-5a/)

Spawn (the comic book by Todd McFarlane) 

Characters and events in this video were designed with representatives of significance. For instance, throughout the entire video, a black haired woman dances and laughs, representing the meaning of “Death” as it follows human through all of its history. Furthermore, slaughters during the Crusades, America's KKK dancing around bonfire, a rally by Nazi-liked military, prisoners in concentration camp, book burning during Kristallnacht, battles during the World War I, the bombing of a Vietnamese village by an American jet (representing Bloody Saturday), Businessmen are committing suicide by jumping from buildings (representing Black Thursday during the Wall Street Crash). Other social and environmental issues such as slavery, whaling, uncontrolled urbanization, vivisection, pollution and genetic modification are also included. The design style changes from realist style into science fiction style when the video shows some future scenarios of the self-destruction of the human race, including “the carpet bombing of a city of clones by futuristic aircraft, computers hijacking the human mind, and finally a nuclear explosion which leaves not only a city in ruins, but the planet damaged beyond recognition.”  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_the_Evolution)

However, near the end of the animation, the earth is briefly seen as an ovum, suggesting a rebirth and the perpetuation of the human condition.

Edit/Animation

Because of the rock music video form, the entire sequence plays in an intensive pace. The content in every scene portrayed complements the song’s meaning and tightly follows the lyrics. As a result, during the four minutes’ time, the amount of shots is an incredible number. 

Animated documentary: I Met the Walrus

Concept

If I am making an animated documentary based on someone’s words, it’s important that these words are strong, relevant and profound. In the case of I Met the Walrus, director Josh Raskin has his disposal, based around the words of one of the greatest singers and speakers, John Lennon. “In 1969, a fourteen-year-old Beatle obsessive Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape machine, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto. The ‘Beatle’ rewarded the teenager’s pluckiness with an interview that contains the distillation of the musician’s message of peaceful protest.” (http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2010/01/17/i-met-the-walrus/)

By taking the initial audio recording of the interview, the director develops Lennon’s words into a unique animation with non-stop visual bombardments. Eventually, ‘I Met the Walrus’ has won all manners of international animation awards, received over two and a half million views on YouTube and was Oscar nominated for best animated short film in 2008.

Design

The director tries to create an old film style as the basic tone to fit the interview occurred about 40 years ago, and he expands on Lennon’s words with a stream of images that complement the verbal content. This amazing animation combines with old school style ink sketching and modern digital illustration. One of the crucial members of the production team, James Braithwaite, “provides the distinctive plethora of pen illustrations. Influence from William Heath Robinson’s eccentric machines can be detected in Braithwaite’s retro style. The turn of the century artist drafted impractically complex and counter intuitive industrial activities. A comparable wit and tension is notable throughout ‘I Met the Walrus’. Alex Kurina is credited as a computer illustrator. This new media artist is likely to be responsible for the modern edge that acts as a counterpoint to Braithwaite’s traditional pen drawings.”(http://animateddocs.wordpress.com/page/6/)

The production team has created a rich visual language that balances past and present. Traditional and modern forms of illustration help audiences to remember the memories for the era.

Edit/Animation

This documentary fills with a huge amount of scenes switching and camera movements. As the camera moves, new images constantly appear from the previous area of focus. Most of these 2D graphics correlates directly to phrases they depict, and follow the rhythm of their description to emphasize and highlighting the meaning of these words. However, on some certain occasion, this style of visual display is not consistent with what they said. For example, when Lennon states that “…the only thing they don’t know about is non-violence and humour.” As the pace of the last word of this sentence is uttered, an image of a humerus bone appears on to the screen instead of showing an illustration of the word “humour”. Obviously, that was the certain purpose set up by the director. As a result, “the pun behind this visual/verbal collision is instantly absorbed while echoing the point that comedy can be powerful and elegant.”(http://animateddocs.wordpress.com/page/6/)

Advertisement: Colour

Concept

“Colour” is a wonderful, traditionally-animated TV advertisement which features an inventive concept, and a melancholic tone that is different from most fashionable ads among recent social media, which fill with more sugar-coated material.

This ad was produced by AKAMA STUDIO for the French TV channel Tiji, which is one of the primary television channels for children under seven years old. The channel’s central mission is to speak to children by engaging their active imaginations. Followed with this purpose, the production team announced that “We probed for an idea that could have been born out of a child’s vivid imagination. In other words, we strove for a concept that could be at the same time funny, poetic and relatable. Whether it was for a child of five, or one of forty-five, whether they were French, English or Chinese, this would be a universal story that would draw upon peoples’ imaginations. We leveraged our creativity to ignite that of the children. This story has the potential to become a children’s classic that can be recounted to children at the zoo or while browsing a book on animals. If pandas and zebras are black and white, it’s because they were forgotten about when the world was being colored in”. (http://www.ddb.com/blog/creativity/tiji-colour/)

Design

This ad basically based on a traditional drawing style, and it began with a world existed only in black and white, like a sketch book for children to paint. After that, as a painting brush dances across the screen revealing vibrant flowers, rich green grass, red fruit in the trees and pink flamingos wading in a pond. The entire world became enriched with colors. The design of nature landscape in this ad tends to be realistic style slightly, plants, rocks, rivers, mountains, all with some certain amount of details. However, the design of animals is completely cartoon style, and the profiles of these animals are much simpler. Furthermore, the vast majority of this ad designed as 2D animation, but in some scenes still can see a bit of 3D effects, which made the whole video more vivid.

Edit/Animation

With a vivacious jazz playing in the background, the editing rhythm of this ad is highly fluent. At the beginning, the music plays in medium speed while the scenes cutting with a consistent pace. Next, when the world became colourful, the music turns to get faster and faster, while scenes switching much more rapidly. At the end of the video, when the panda sadly realized that he was left for giving colour, the music style became slower, and the editing rhythm turned slow too. Audience is also impressed by the richly varied camera movement of this ad. For example, in one of the scenes, the camera followed a running gazelle on African grasslands, then the camera exceeded the gazelle and continued to trace a flying bird until the sunlight fill with the whole screen to finish the scene transition.

TV show opener: Game of Thrones

Concept

HBO’s Game of Thrones is an enormously successful TV series based on a series of epic fantasy novels (A Song of Ice and Fire) written by George R. R. Martin. The opener of this TV series is also a recognized outstanding work, which won Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Main Title Design.

At first, the production team did not want to create something that’s been done before like what audiences have seen in Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. Although those things are wonderful, they aimed to do something different.

Finally, the opener shows “a fiery astrolabe orbits high above a world not our own; its massive Cardanic structure sinuously coursing around a burning center, vividly recounting an unfamiliar history through a series of heraldic tableaus emblazoned upon it. An intricate map is brought into focus, as if viewed through some colossal looking glass by an unseen custodian. Cities and towns rise from the terrain, their mechanical growth driven by the gears of politics and the cogs of war. From the spires of King’s Landing and the godswood of Winterfell, to the frozen heights of The Wall and windy plains across the Narrow Sea, Elastic’s thunderous cartographic flight through the Seven Kingdoms offers the uninitiated a sweeping education in all things Game of Thrones.” (http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/game-of-thrones/)

Design

The basic design of the opener consists of a 3D map of the world, with the continents located on the inner surface of a sphere. At the center of the sphere is a light source, effectively a sun surrounded by an astrolabe-like arrangement of rotating rings. This concept design based on a hypothetical megastructure called Dyson sphere which was first described by American physicist Freeman Dyson. This Dyson sphere-like layout determines the positional and lighting relationships between all objects in this scene.

Furthermore, the design style for all these objects, including the sun, astrolabes, continents, castles etc., is trying to make these objects look like physical objects (handicrafts). Followed this purpose, everything seems to be made of wood, metal, leather, fabric, all natural materials. Meanwhile, each object has unique tone, color, gloss and texture which based on its material.

Specifically, the design style of buildings referenced Leonardo’s machines (according to interview from the director), the way the entire city emerge from the ground looks like mechanism. When the gear begins turning, moving other cogs, and then you can see buildings start rising out of the ground with great details.

(http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/game-of-thrones/)

Edit/Animation

The edit style of the whole sequence is dynamic. The camera keeps moving the whole time, and there are hardly any still ones through the whole video. Although this opener was created by using 3D software such as Maya, it still looks like shooting practically with a real motion controlled camera inside the sphere. Each movement of the camera is so accurate that make it looks more real. Furthermore, even when camera is zooming in, it looks like the camera is switching lens to adjust focal length to see more clearly. As a result, the whole idea makes this opener getting more real, taking audiences on an unparalleled epic fantasy journey.