Documentary – Jennifer Shi

Introduction

“How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue?”

For our Documentary Unit I chose to focus on creating a profile of my Grandfather, Bo Yun Shi. He passed away before I could remember him, however he left many art books and paintings that are still owned by my family. My goal was to learn more about my grandfather’s life because of the art he left behind, I learned that he experienced lots of turmoil in his life but kept his passion for art. Our Documentary Unit emphasizes on narrative style journalism.

I think this was an important step for me to embrace my culture but also understand the unfortunate circumstances that affected my grandfather and eventually lead me to be where I am today.

PhotoGallery

Animations

Final Animated Documentary

Process

I created a list of questions to ask my interviewees and recorded it, after that I uploaded the audio to Adobe Audition for cutting out unnecessary audio and making my audio short enough to animate to.

I did the bulk of my animation work was done in Adobe Photoshop. I drew backgrounds and for one scene I created a 360 panorama mapped drawing which I could animate in Adobe After Effects. I kept most of my animations in a watercolor-like art style to try to emulate traditional Chinese brush painting.

Here I am showing how my 360 image works, you can see I only created the parts of the background that would be shown when animated on video so it cuts off at the edges.

Adobe After Effects is were I did all my editing, I matched the animations up to the audio and added effects. You can see I layered animations over backgrounds. Here’s how I made the fish catching scene: I used After Effects to animate my 360 background with the Camera tool for a POV effect, then I layered 2D animations onto that 3D Plane. With a Camera shake as the finishing touch that scene was done.

Animatic

What is an Animatic? An animatic is like an animated story board that allows animators to get a better understanding of timing with their audio. Animatics allow you to plan the length of your animated scenes. My animatic is very unpolished and sketchy.

Documentary Magazine Article

I wrote a magazine article profile of my grandfather that gives more in depth knowledge of the life of Bo Yun Shi. It goes in more depth about how the the Sino-Japanese War, Chinese Civil War, and the Communist Revolution affected his life.