Now that I have the aesthetic figured out, with the environment I hope to create something like a hinamatsuri doll display, since the seating arrangement of a stadium reminds me of the steps of the doll displays and my main inspiration comes from Japanese dolls anyhow. Also, I'll have to really look into how sumo stadiums are designed. On that note, here's what I hope to work on for next week:
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Since it is new story, it's really more like draft 1.2. On that note, the new premise the annual sumomo match, in which the loser gets taken and eaten. Messy thumbnails... ...And the animatic! As an side, the other wrestler is a Japanese apricot ("ume") called Umo, although its design is taken from one of my sumomo brainstorms.
The new premise of my story is just based around a sumo match. Since just having a match is a little pointless though in terms of animation, what I plan is to make reference to sumo being a sport to entertain gods-- the losing peach gets fed to some greater being. Or something like that. On that note, the final character sheet for our main peach!: With the new story, I also decided to scrap Master Daikon (RIP) since I no longer need him. Instead, I need a high-ranking gyoji. Here are the designs I brainstormed. I want the character's head to spin in order to change facial expressions, so the design of kokeshi dolls is a heavy influence. As well, I want the clothes of the doll to have a paper feel to them, so I looked towards shiori ningyo (flat folded paper girl dolls). I also looked towards the way dolls are posed in Hinamatsuri displays. I also referenced wooden hand models so that I could figure out how the hands would work. After all that, the final product! Since I wanted a high ranking gyoji, this image of tate-gyoji Kimura SHonosuke was a big help Below is pretty much of all the other images I referenced to design the gyoji I also started designing some background characters in case the need arises.
I'm thinkin the yobidashi can be things like squid and octopus-- since they have so many things to do, extra pairs of arms are always handy! After some feedback on the 18th, most of my peers said that the sumo element of the animatic is ultimately what stood out and to focus more on that. Since I know next to nothing about sumo, I had to do a whole bunch of research. On the plus side, I'm a lot more sure of what to do! At least, I think so. The following is a compilation of all the links I read thus far on sumo wrestling, with a few important, relevant points to my film I pulled out. General Info
Sources http://www.chijanofuji.com/Glossary.html http://www.sumotalk.com/structure.htm http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2080.html People Gyoji
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C5%8Dji http://ozumou.com/e/archives/56 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/26/Gyoji_costume.png/200px-Gyoji_costume.png Yobidashi
Sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yobidashi Judges I'll have to look more into this, but from what I could find it looks like there are about five judges that sit outside the ring and determine whether or not the gyoji made the right decision. They wear traditional Japanese clothing as well. Movement I managed to find this explanation of rules and list of moves. For the most part it seems sumo wrestling has more of a focus on upper body. http://www.sumotalk.com/rules.htm I also watched the following video to get a better sense of how things run and how the wrestlers move. If I'm honest though, I'm still quite confused. I'll need to watch a lot more. I'd actually watched the video first before doing any research, so everything was very confusing. Here are some small notes I took while I watched.
Before making the actual animatic I did some messy thumbnails just to help me get the hang of the flow of everything. I ended up eliminating the shot with Master Daikon raising the sword, but there's still much to be improved-- I'm still not sure where this is going. There's also no sound at the moment, but I hope to create a track using taiko, something similar to the short film "Dodoba" by Yon Hui Lee (link) On a separate note, some goals I hope to hit for next week:
I'm still a little undecided but, some notes!
Since the theme of the film is based around sumo wrestling, I want to try and (respectfully) draw from traditional Japanese art and aesthetics in terms of visual influences. Primarily, dolls for the characters, fabric patterns and woodblock prints for the environment. After doing some research, I’ve narrowed down the types of dolls I can probably get some ideas out of: Daruma Okiagari koboshi Both these and daruma are weighted at the bottom so that they'll never tip over (though to my understanding, not all daruma are weighted). Kokeshi Hina There are a lot of different types and styles as these are all a part of traditions within the Hinamatsuri (Doll Festival) thus these are just some photos of ones that I think could be stylistically relevant. Hakata Some of these look rather similar to hina dolls but they're specifically made of fired clay. Teru Teru Bozu To be honest, I don’t know if these could be useful, I just think they’re cute. Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_dolls http://www.kyohaku.go.jp/eng/dictio/senshoku/hina.html https://www.jnto.go.jp/eng/spot/handcrft/nagashibina.html Some notes...
Just before Winter Break we were asked to start preparing concepts and the like for our third year films. I'd been marinating on an idea for a while involving a couple of old characters I'd designed in the recent past-- namely, wise old Master Daikon I'd used in my first-year film, who is, of course, a daikon radish, and a peach sumo wrestler I'd created as part of a sticker set I designed called "Fruit Punch". As can be seen below, I did some brainstorming on character re-designs for the two. However, I'm not quite happy with them just yet, so further research and brainstorming will be conducted to finalize an art style I'm happy with. I'll be drawing inspiration from traditional Japanese crafts and artwork, with daruma dolls and ukiyo e as starting points. As for the film itself, I aim to make it about a minute in length and done in 3D animation. The title "Sumomo" is a play on the Japanese words "相撲" (sumo) and "桃" (momo; English translation: peach), in reference to the sumo-wrestling peaches. The story is set to follow Master Daikon, who runs a sumo house and grows "sumomos" on the peach tree in his backyard. He'll only accept the best-- those who lose matches are discarded and a new peach is plucked from the tree to replace them.
Admittedly I'm having some trouble pinning down a specific way to approach this plot, so that will have to be worked on as well. Let's go! |
AuthorNice to meet you! I'm Kristine. Currently a third year student studying animation at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Archives
September 2017
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