“Out of Sight,” a graduation project by Yu Ya-ting, Yeh Ya-hsuan and Chung Ling from the Department of Multimedia and Animation Art at National Taiwan University of Arts, has emerged as one of the most popular animations on Yahoo Japan this fall, with the highest click-through rate in early October, according to media reports in Taiwan. The team of three young women has even been called the “Hayao Miyazaki of Taiwan.”
Miyazaki is one of Japan’s greatest animators, with works such as “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind,” “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Spirited Away” and “Howl’s Moving Castle” capturing the hearts of audiences at home and abroad. “Spirited Away” won him the Academy Award for best animated feature in 2002.
“Out of Sight” is a five-minute long clip about a blind girl named Chico, who is robbed on the street one day and strays from her familiar route. Chasing after her pet dog Gogo by following the sound of its barks, Chico passes through a hedge and enters an unknown world, beginning a magical adventure based on her senses and imagination.
“Originally, we wanted to work on a story about a dead longan tree that split in half at my grandparent’s house three days after my grandfather passed away, but we realized we were unfamiliar with stories about death and didn’t have enough life experience to develop the theme into a touching story,” said Yu, director of the animation.
After many group discussions and inspired by their professor’s stories about trips to schools for the blind, Yu and her teammates decided to produce an animation about the imaginary world of a blind person.
They noted that people get to know their surroundings through their senses, with sight being the most important of all. “We rely on our sight to an incredible degree,” the crew said. “We wondered what it would be like to be blind.” The story in their film developed out of this curiosity.
Although they now had a story and a theme, cooperation in the beginning was rocky as conflicts on how to produce the animation arose. “I wanted to try hand-drawn animation because it has a warm and natural touch that the software Flash lacks, but others objected because none of us really had the experience of producing a hand-drawn animation,” Yu said.
“Even our professors were concerned that we wouldn’t meet the assignment’s submission deadline if we used this time-consuming method.”
In the end, after running a few tests and calculating the time needed, the young women agreed to use hand-drawn animation, while utilizing software such as Flash, MonkeyJam, ACDSee and Photoshop for animation tests, pencil tests, file transferring, coloring and other background management.
Work was allotted according to the strengths of individual crew members. Yu and Chung know how to do animation, so they were assigned to draw the characters, while Yeh was responsible for the background, coloring and compositing.
“The protagonist Chico was based on a character Yu had created in the past, but Gogo’s appearance troubled her for quite some time. She had in mind a dog with a corgi body and the ears and nose of a dachshund,” the trio noted. “Gogo was only styled after we had looked at a number of stuffed animals for reference.”
“Gogo’s appearance and many of its actions were developed with reference to the Walt Disney Co.’s animations ‘One Hundred and One Dalmatians’ and ‘Lady and the Tramp,’” the team said. “The idea for Chico’s transformation was based on ‘Aladdin,’ while her bumping into the hedge was inspired by Miyazaki’s ‘Spirited Away.’”
One of the most time-consuming parts of producing an animation is tweening, which allows images to evolve smoothly into each other across frames. “The drafts must be clear, with no miscellaneous lines, or you won’t be able to tween the images,” Yu explained.
The young artists acknowledged making some errors while producing “Out of Sight,” including not setting the head-to-toe ratios of Chico and Gogo, and not standardizing the length of Chico’s dress or the size of Gogo’s nose. These mistakes caused the characters to look slightly different on every model sheet.
“Luckily, they were designed and drawn by Yu, who managed to fix them up as we went,” the animators said. “If they had been drawn by other team members, we would have had some serious problems.”
Dubbing and soundtracking were other challenges the group faced. “It took us three tryouts to find the voice we needed,” Yu noted.
“First we used the voice of a boy who lives next door to me, but he said he didn’t understand some of Chico’s actions, so we recruited an adult mimicking a child’s voice for the second tryout, thinking that maybe adults could understand our production better, but the voice was unnatural. Finally, we came across a little girl and used most of her voice recordings, complementing some of them with the neighbor boy’s voice.”
With regard to soundtracking, the problem was synchronizing the music with the movements of the characters. “We started by controlling the tempo of the music, and this imposed limitations on our film editing, and also caused a lot of inconvenience for our music composers,” the team said.
“We had to change composers several times in the course of production as we struggled to modify the music, since some were just too busy or lived too far away for immediate contact. Fortunately, we found Arvis Pan, who helped us adjust the music in a very short period, allowing us to submit the film before the general review deadline by our department,” the young women said.
May 21 to 24, they participated in the Young Designers’ Exhibition in Taipei, a graduation show and the largest student-oriented design exhibition in Asia, attracting more than 95,000 domestic and international visitors every year. Their entry won them a silver award in the digital media category.
Currently, the popularity of “Out of Sight” on Youtube has more than doubled from 400,000 views in mid-October to 882,769 as of Nov. 19, with comments such as “lovely film” and “a wonderful job” repeatedly appearing. One netizen by the name of LordWasd even noted, “This was awesome! I love the fact we see things as she [Chico] detects them with her remaining senses. Work of genius!” (THN)
Write to Grace Kuo at morningk@mail.gio.gov.tw