Yifei Long

GSMD project-Micro aggresive

Yifei Long ⋅ 23rd January 2023

In this project, I collaborate with my teammate Coco( Tiantian Mai) and Eleanor from Guildhall School of Drama. We created the work themed Micro-aggressive, which disclosed the subtle hostility that exists in interpersonal communication, and show the harm that this malice causes to people. ( What are micro-aggressions and micro-invalidations) My understanding is, this unit is an introspection into reality problem which is common in school life. Depicting and presenting such problems, helps the audience begin to think about how to face and dispel them. This will help to embed an inclusive culture in the school.

·The establish of the overall style of the project & concept design
Brain storm:
When first conceiving this project, Coco and I agreed that perhaps the protagonist of the story should be referred into general, rather than limited to a particular group. The term micro-aggressive refers to a subtle exclusivity, this exclusion is often seen when someone is marginalized and stigmatized by an established group when he first tries to integrate into it. It manifests in the form of neglect, exclusion, and isolation.

When people face such subconscious prejudices, the negative feeling of self-doubt, and self-denial, will accumulate over time. At the same time, the damage they cause to the person is also cumulative, so he has to compromise and change himself for fitting in the group, but negatively. This may even cause by the traits and habits of the person that do not conform to the group’s ‘majority’. These traits may be about gender, race, nationality, language, or hobbies.

Research & Character design:
So we didn’t want our character to be confined to these qualities (factors). We wanted to convey that this is a fact that everyone may encounter and face. Then the audience can aware of the importance of it.

Then we explored a better way to express our concept through communication and gathering materials. We intend to combine various materials to create an experimental animation. The main character was designed as a paper figure. Because we believe that paper the medium is easy to shape and easy to be influenced. It can be folded and painted in various colors, which fits perfectly with an image of ‘to be handled and treated’. It also implies a metaphor: the newcomer is the unshaped person, and the process of integration and compliance of micro-aggressive is the process of being shaped by the majority and becoming one of them.

We believe that we can visualize the effects and damage that the character receives. This is a common technique used in animation to exaggerate the emotions of a character. Because the subject is a paper figure, we want to cut, stitch and dye the body to represent the ‘accumulated pain’ of the person.

Concept design:
I designed this concept art for the animation, which set the overall art style and tone: A paper person, in the middle of chaos and confusion, is overwhelmed by the tumors surrounding his body, symbolizing ‘being affected’ and ‘being hurt’.

(I found the reference with Coco, and I drew the concept illustration)

Narrative concept & story board design:
At the beginning of the storyboard design, we set up a variety of different windows. Each window represents a group of people and their style is different. Like dancers with glamorous outfits or bandsmen with a rocking percussive style. The protagonist walks between the windows and is influenced by a variety of cultures. This influence is visually embodied, sewing into the protagonist’s body as he walks, and different colors are applied to his body. The protagonist shows reactions of rejection, but these are accepted by him by default.

As he walks and experiences, these influences begin to gradually expose and destroy him. He starts unable to withstand the cumulative damage and becomes like a monster which unable to be self-consistent with the vast and complex volume of socializing. He is also unsure how to establish himself in such chaos. Our first edition is designed to tell such a story.

**Relative techniques:**
Technically, Coco and I wanted to enhance the visual impact of the images through the newly developed AI filter technology. AI filters have an ‘associative, pixelated’ image style, which fits our theme of ‘the protagonist being affected’. We also wanted to add elements of stop-motion and collage to the animation to enrich the visuals.

These are our animatic test:

(The first video was shot by me and Coco,the idea was Coco’s.The second shot was designed by me and the third drop shot was Coco’s idea, and I drw it.)

·After tutorials and the feedback after the first presentation
Overall assessment
The plot is not very understandable
The overall re-working
(1. Addition of stage design)
(2. Redesign of the storyboard)
The combination of live-action scenes and animation style
Copyright restrictions on AI technology
The design of the montage of live-action shots
↑(on the presentation and realization of embodiment)

During the weekly tutorials and discussions with the teacher, we obtained the following advices and modifications:

Our understanding of micro-aggressive is relatively biased compared to the teacher’s. The teacher and the client wanted to define this kind of hidden bullying as something more specific than a general reference to ‘being influenced’. It could be verbal taunts, questioning, and sarcasm in the eyes, or ignoring in behavior. The inclusion of these would make the play more readable, clearer, and more specific.
The teacher approved of our design for the characters and overall style and encouraged us to present our work using integrated materials and experimental animation expressions. This style was unique and can show a new form of the theme.
The teacher suggested that we could write some key words to help us understand micro aggressive on different levels, step by step, and suggested that it was important to show a sense of contrast between before and after the character was affected, so as to show the substantial harm caused by the micro-aggressive.

Modifications:
Taking the above feedback, we have retained the overall stylistic tone and the design of the paper figures and have achieved further developments.

We have established these three keywords: Alienates Dehumanize Destroy. We intended to stage the whole story in three acts, with each act corresponding to each keyword. This would reflect the cumulative and progressive nature of the impact of micro-aggressive on people and give the plot a sense of progression. Meanwhile, the style also fits in with the traits of music and opera.

Our redesigned storyboard as follows:
In terms of the plot, this is a person’s attempt to fit into a collective.

(The timeline of the script was arrange by me and Coco, the storyboard was drawn by me, the stage design was a combination of suggestions from both of us together and I did the animation for stage construction.←can be seen in the animation video.)
**Animatic process:**
In the animation, we tried the following techniques.

1.Going to the Guildhall school to take real film shoots in first person perspective, to give the images a sense of immersion and realism. We then filtered this part of the scene with AI to realize the idea we had previously conceived to reflect the impact of reality. (This part of the job was handed over to coco)

2.We drew the dynamic state of the paper man frame by frame on the computer, like walking, curling up, falling, etc., making sure the animation ran smoothly before drawing the paper people one by one by hand, cutting them out, and re-editing them into a GIF animation with a transparent background before adding the background.

3.We also tried a lot of live shots to realize the idea of how we wanted to shape and torture this paper man. As you can see in the picture: we soaked the paper man in the water, colored him in harsh colors, and sewed him together with other little paper men. Although these clips may seem abstract, we intended to convey how he was hurting inside. These shoots were selected and integrated and cut into the film as a montage.

4.In addition, I also designed the other characters that appear in the animation. I wanted them to be characters with personalities that also take on the ‘majority’ nature of the film, also the perpetrators of the micro-aggressive of the main character. Their main characteristic is concise gesture and mean gaze.

And this is our presentation version animation:

(AI animation and background design part was done by Coco, and I design the character. We all try to make animation, and we took the real-shot together in Guildhall school.)

·The second presentation & feedbacks
The stage design is a good idea and could be retained
Too much of a mish-mash of things to understand the plot
The design is good but needs to be more focused on the theme
Might try some specific text to make it more readable

Taking these suggestions together, I have redesigned the entire second act. I wanted to focus on the imagery of the main character being stared at, being scrutinized, and to use specific words to reflect the questioning of those around him. This led to the design of images such as:

And used punchy colors, constantly shaking, sometimes sharp lines to reflect the main character’s inner ripples. I also wrote out the words of the people around me and animated the text to shake and become fluid through AE to show this. The words flow into a pool of water in which the protagonist struggles and eventually sinks.

At the end of this edition, the feedback from the teachers became much more positive; the text conveys attitudes and emotions succinctly and powerfully, and the use of text animation is the right strategy.

(All the above designs are made by myself)
**·Final adjustment & music track**
I reset some of the rougher shots from before. The main technique used was the principle of stop-motion animation, cropping down transparent background PNG format images to collage on procreate to complete the animation.

For the third act, Coco and I finally experimented with a live-action stage set. Our entire third act was designed to fit our keyword ‘destroy’, with a whole, continuous montage of cuts. In this section, we wanted to concentrate on the abstract, without any specific narrative meaning. It is a depiction of a person’s inner wreckage after accumulating too much stress and negative emotions. I also edited in fluid text and reflected the effect of these things in the protagonist’s mind through repeated flashes of the previous images.

Regarding the music production, our discussions with Eleanor went relatively successfully. The first version she gave us was more classical classic music, a bit like the old Disney animation soundtrack. It was very well produced but didn’t fit in with our theme. We wanted the soundtrack to be more experimental as well, something that would work with the images through eerie sound effects and dissonant melodies. Eventually, we also wanted to include some distortion in the full version.

(These optimizes are made by myself, the stage is build by me and Coco, and we film it together.)
Our final outcome(without music)is here:

In fact, at first, I was quite ambitious about this project, and many interesting ideas came to mind. During the sketch process, Coco and I kept communicating and discussing, and conceived many things: For example, we wanted to draw the inner conflict of the main character as a monster, and we wanted to design some windows to represent different identities of people. Although it was a joyful process to document and experiment with all of these in the brainstorming stage, it was still difficult to put them into the work because they were disorganized and unstructured. We had to go through a lot of deletions. But these interesting designs were able to sink into our minds as experience, and we learned how to structure the story more strategically and logically to make it accessible to the readers.

These are some of the deleted scraps and Settings: