Animation Test using Rubberhose and Puppet Pin (Studio 1 - Week 4)

This week, I endeavoured to create an animation based on one of the One Hundred Ghost Stories from Japan. A popular storytelling parlour game of the Edo period, participants would gather after dark in a room lit by 100 candles. As each story was completed, a candle was blown out. As the room gradually darkened, the participants’ imaginations thrilled with expectation, and when the final tale was completed and the final candle extinguished it was said a supernatural phenomenon would occur.

I first heard about the Ghost Stories through Hokusai's prints, and wanted to bring one of these stories to life through animation, and ultimately light projection. 

The story I chose was The mansion of the plates (Sara yashiki):

"The samurai Aoyama Tessan accuses his housemaid Okiku of breaking one plate from a valuable set of ten. Aoyama is enraged when Okiku maintains her innocence, murders her and disposes of her body in a well. Thereafter, night after night, Okiku’s voice is heard from the depths of the well, mournfully counting from one to nine, after which she lets out a chilling cry."

To align with the theme of candles and lamps in a dark room, I opted for a shadowplay visual style - creating the animation assets similar to shadow puppets. I did some research into shadow puppets, and was drawn to variations in opacity, texture and shapes which I tried to replicate in Illustrator.

Not coming from an illustration or animation background, I learnt a lot through this experiment, including:

• How to create animation assets in Illustrator to be imported into After Effects for animating (e.g. grouping elements, separating into layers, etc.)
• How to use the Puppet Pin tool in After Effects
• How to use the Rubberhose plugin in After Effects
• How to export animations in After Effects with a transparent background

Reflection: I still got a lot of work to do for the animation - at the moment, the movements are quite jarring, and the character design could be pushed more. I'd like to play around with blurring foreground/background elements and create a sense of depth. Overall, there's still a lot of work to be done, but this a huge first step for me in terms of learning more about how to do animation in After Effects.

Temp music score credits: Brother & Sister from the Hereditary soundtrack by Colin Stetson