I was assigned to work with the 2nd year MA Character Animation student Bingqi Liu. Bingqi has been working on her final project about the everyday fears of a mother who has just sent her child off to school. Initially, Bingqi had sent me an email saying my work with her would be to collect references and I was willing to do that. However, in her second email, she gave me the option to pick between collecting references or character development. As I’ve mentioned a few times on the blog, character development and the creative pre-production process of animation are my favourite things to work on so I asked Bingqi if it would be okay for me to play around with the characters. It also helped that the initial mockup I was sent immediately appealed to me. Bingqi immediately agreed to give me reign in this department.
I started out with silhouette mockups of the mother and child first. I sent in the files and got a reply with the silhouettes that best fit the story.
This is when my other assignments started clashing with this and the time I had to put into all of them. I was a little unsure of where to proceed from that point. I believe Bingqi was working on the references part of the project at the same time. I was reached out to again a few days later asking if I would be able to provide drawn-out character references for poses in the animatic. And that even if it wasn’t the final design it didn’t matter because these references would be far more important to have at hand.
I took up the challenge and got to work immediately. Bingqi’s style is very expressive and works wonders in animation. My style has always been a little bit more restrictive and subdued and I’ve always wanted to expand and reach out of my comfort zone a little, so this assignment also helped me broaden my horizons. First I started with the child going through almost every single pose and expression on the animatic. This was the outcome:
Next, I started working on the mother. This one was a little more exciting as a few of the shots with the mother were close-ups to focus on her reactions. I got to pay more attention to her expressions this way. This was the outcome:
When I handed in the sketches, Bingqi seemed ecstatic about the outcomes. She said this was perfect for what she was going for. That I’d gotten most of them down and that she could proceed from there. She asked me to focus on my assignments from that point as I’d finished the tasks she asked me to and told me to reach out again later if I had some time to spare. Unfortunately, my work has been extended till the night before submission and I haven’t been able to reach out for more work. Maybe in the coming weeks, I could check in with her and ask if she needs my help with something small.
Overall, I had a wonderful time working on this and I’m very much looking forward to seeing her final film someday. The creative vision behind it is so wholesome and relatable and I’ve always been a sucker for narratives revolving around a mother and child so I’m honoured I got paired up with Bingqi to work on this project.