Egg Reflection

Starting from an egg, I ­­stretched into several ideas. As the motion graphic, I chose to make the origin story of an egg ghost which is a folklore in Korea. Related to that, I made a booklet about the plastic surgery for my second project. People would wonder about the connection between of an egg ghost and the plastic surgery. The egg ghost is a symbol of loss of identity. It does not know who it is, how it lived, and where it is from. Also, it does not have any facial features which can be a tool to know about itself. Plastic surgery is making nowadays’ egg ghosts. Excluding people who need surgical methods for their health, many people choose to do the plastic surgery to simply to be beautiful and to fit to the standard of the society. Accordingly, I decided to make the origin of an egg ghost for the animation and the booklet tells about the risks of the plastic surgery and how the society affected people on their appearance.

The egg ghost is an old horror story in Korea so I wanted to express old feelings and the scary feelings together on the animation. Initially, I tried out to draw make both of backgrounds and the characters with ink. However, I found it hard to express feelings of characters with ink so I left the ink blooming effects for the background and tried out the cut out animation feelings for characters.

The cut out animation is an animation with papers. It usually does not have facial features of characters. I thought this characteristic can be fit to my animation which is about an egg ghost. To give more horrific feelings, I tried out with different angles as I learnt from the workshop. It really helped me to develop more interesting angles to make the animation more dynamic. At the end, I did ink blooming effects with brushes in Krita for the background to give traditional feelings and used die cut feelings with the pen tool in Illustrator to make characters scary. For colours, I used red and black. On the black based animation, little bit of red made the scene more tensed.

To be honest, I am not really satisfied with the outcome of the animation. Because it was longer than 30 seconds, I had to adjust the speed of the animation. At last, the animation was too fast and it did not look finished well. If I get to do the animation again, I will think more specific about the speed and the number of scenes to fit to the certain limit of the time.

Also, I would work more on the movement of characters. Some of characters looked like a stop motion. I will also adjust the sounds better because some sound matched okay with the scene but some did not. For the animation, I have so many regrets on characters, speed, sounds, and colours. But it was good experience to know how the animation works and learn about different angles that can make the scene more interesting. Before this semester, I did not know how hard to make the animation. After I did make the animation, when I watch Disney, I am so impressed about they made more than an hour of animations. I am just proud on I finished the animation.

For my second project, I had many trial and error. At the end, I decided to stick to the direct mail style booklet to talk about the plastic surgery, focused on facial surgery. To give more shock to people, I tried to trick people at first and showed the reversal page of the previous one. I searched on many plastic surgery advertisements to make the booklet like about the plastic surgery. For this booklet, I used red based colours for both of beauty advertisement parts and reality parts to give consistency. I used pinkish colours for trick pages of the plastic surgery advertisement and used red and black that is related to the animation for the reality parts of the plastic surgery.

For advertisement pages, I used sweet words and used illustration of beautiful people with happy-looking smile on. As many hospitals are using before and after pictures and coupons for students, I included those features to make it more believable advertisements.

For reversed pages, I included researches of percentages of people get the plastic surgery, how people think about reasons of the plastic surgery, and the risks of the plastic surgery with creepy looking illustrations using the map of Apgujeong plastic surgery street (where are lots of plastic surgery hospitals) and funeral pictures of before and after pictures. I used pen tool in Illustrator for illustrations. I traced the pictures and changed into a plastic surgery advertisement style.

For covers, I used die cuts. Because the plastic surgery is cutting bones out and gnaw holes on bones, I thought it would be nice to have some clues about the plastic surgery before the reader reads the booklet. The front cover and the back cover have different moods. The front cover is more bright and pretty than the back cover to trick people first about the plastic surgery. The back cover is with darker colour and the quote that can make people think about the plastic surgery. I kept the consistency by using die cuts and the same embossing technique. I wanted people to feel different moods and think about the plastic surgery more serious as they read the booklet.

I think the second project was a new try out. I have never done this kind of talking about dark side of the society seriously. It was really nice to try out and talk about the reality that is hidden. I liked how reversed pages and beauty pages felt differently. However, I really have to work more on layouts and pen tool skills. Some of layouts looked a bit weird and illustrations with pen tool looked a bit messy. Also, I have to work more on making mock ups and doing techniques like embossing and die cut.

Overall, this semester made me panic. Although, it was really good to try out new techniques and new styles. I think it was the hardest semester so far but it made me to grow up more on making different styles of designs and using more various tools and software. I feel like this semester will last long in my memory because it was really worth to panicking with new styles and software I used. It felt really nice to give information with designs I did while people are trying to cover up the truth. This made me to think about the design deeper. I guess design can be a good tool to talk about topics without hurting anyone’s feelings.