Last year, Annlin
Chao – an animator
currently living in London who grew up in Taiwan, directed a beautiful mixed-medium
(but primarily stop motion) video entitled “Traveling
Through Brush and Ink”
for the National Palace Museum in Taiwan which was featured in their 2016
annual exhibition. The inspiration and the subject of the piece were four
separate landscape paintings from three distinctive eras of Chinese history:
the Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties.
The four
paintings which each scene in the film are based off are:
·
Emperor
Minghuang’s Journey to Shu – Anonymous, Tang dynasty
·
Travelers
Among Mountains and Streams – Fan Kuan (ca. 950-1031), Song dynasty
·
Ancient
Temple in a Mountain Pass – Jia Shigu (fl. 1131-1162), Song dynasty
·
Autumn
Colors on the Ch’iao and Hua Mountains – Chao Meng-fu (1254-1322), Yuan dynasty
The piece opens
with a two-dimensional traditionally-animated character – a little modern man –
who discovers each of these paintings in
a scroll. He is then transported into a stop motion world where each of these
landscape paintings are locations through which he begins to travel. The
character then begins to, in a way distinct to Chinese artistry with philosophical
undertones, transform into many different objects and creatures found in nature
(i.e. a fish) through his journey in exploring these paintings, brought to life
in three-dimensions. In this 3D world, the character is animated in two-dimensions
using laser-cut rapid-prototyping. It’s an interesting concept, both
artistically and thematically: that the viewer experiencing a work of art would
become two-dimensional like a painting, while the painting itself adopted 3D
qualities, becoming the tangible reality.
The idea behind
the film, as well, is an interesting choice and one that is somewhat rarely
explored in stop motion – art history, specifically of Chinese and Eastern
culture.
One of my
favorite moments of technical beauty in the film begins at 1:15 into the runtime
and lasts for four seconds. In it we see a gorgeous swiveling shot, seemingly around the two-dimensional paper-cutout
character as the camera spins around, panning over to a different background,
giving the character the illusion of three-dimensions. One of the reasons why I
think this moment is so brilliant is that it cannot conceal that the character
is only two-dimensional, although (even after watching the moment over several
times) the camera and the character within the shot give the illusion that the
two-dimensional puppet is in three-dimensions.
The video was
posted by the director of the film, Annlin’s, Vimeo page, where you can go to
see more of her incredible work. You can also explore her animation on her website, as well as Facebook page.
Here are the
credits for the film:
Art Director: Pu
Chen
Director: Annlin
Chao
Composer: Pi Chiu
Color Design : Kuan Hung Chen
Film Editing : Chia-Hung Lin,
Ping-Kuei Lin
Scene Design:
Ren-Hao Cai, Jia-Jhen Syu
Graphics Design:
Chung-Yang Chen
Special Effects:
Yo-Cheng Zheng
Lighting Assistant:
Chang Wen Liang
Assistant Animation:
Lu Chang, Petula Hsiao, Jamie Xuan, Cheng Leo, Hung-Xie Chia, Szu-Yu Tu, Lee Te
Yi
Executive Producer: National Palace
Museum
Executive: 247Visualart
Production: XXtralab
Note to
reader:
If you’re
reading this post on the Stop Motion Geek website, you may have noticed a few
changes in the design of the blog itself. This past week I began to update the blog in a
few ways.
The first of the
major changes to the blog was an update to the blog template, which replaced an
outdated template to a newer, brighter, and easier-to-navigate page.
The second element
updated was the pages on the blog featuring behind-the-scenes content from many
famous stop motion films. These pages were consolidated into one, main,
behind-the-scenes page instead of the prior several individual pages focusing
on one film. The new page features all of the films that were previously given
their own pages, as well as a number of newer stop motion films that have been
released since 2013. For each film on the page there is a playlist of videos and
behind-the-scenes resources such as links to articles and to purchase the
making-of books for each given film. I recommend going to check out that page
if you haven’t already to see the updates done to it.
The third update
I made to the blog was an unfortunate accident: I unknowingly deleted the
frequently asked questions page, which was just recently updated. That being
said, I’m making attempts to recover the page but with little luck, so I might
end up having to rewrite the entire page if I can’t find a hardcopy somewhere.
Depending on whether I can recover the old page or not (if anyone can help me
with this I would be much obliged), the page will be up again in the next few
weeks.
Travelling Through Brush and Ink | National Palace Museum Taiwan 筆墨行旅 | 台灣故宮 逐格動畫 from annlinchao on Vimeo.
Travelling Through Brush and Ink | Making of 筆墨行旅 | 幕後特輯 from annlinchao on Vimeo.
