Play the movie!

Background

"Feng Shui" means wind and water in Chinese. It is an art in arranging places for living and working, therefore improves the quality of people's life. The theory of the "Feng Shui" is based on the ancient Chinese philosophy of "Yin Yang". The original meaning of "Yin" is "shady side" which is the side of a mountain that is not facing the sun. "Yin" is used to represent earth, dark, stable, cold and north. The opposite side of the "Yin" is "Yang". "Yang" means "sunny side" which is the side of a mountain that is facing the sun. It is used to represent sky, bright, vivid, warm and south. "Tai ji" is a symbol to describe the relationship of "Yin" and "Yang". In the symbol, "Yin" is represented by a dark fish and "Yang" by a bright fish. They circle around and form a cycle. The symbol represents constant movement between "Yin" and "Yang". "Yin" exists in "Yang" and "Yang" exists in "Yin". The movement between these two states creates energy, which is the driving force of the universe. By using the theory of "Feng Shui", people can make proper decisions on the arrangements for their living and working places to avoid obstruction for the flow of energy in the environment. It is not only good for the environment, but also good for the well being of the people who live in it.

Animation

The followings are steps how the animation is created.

Step 1 -- Adobe Photoshop 4.0

• Adobe Photoshop 4.0 was used to create the background texture.
• The light grey was chosen for the background.
• The two Chinese characters "feng shui" were drawn by using the function of "brush". I tried to give them a real brush writing look. Several "Tai Ji" symbols were added in the background to represent the theory of which the "Feng Shui" is based on. They also made the scene not monotonous.






Step 2 -- Corel Bryce 5 trial

• Corel Bryce 5 trial version was download from corel.com website.
• Setting up the document: The resolution of the animation was 240 by 180 .
• Setting up the animation: The length of this film was 20 seconds and there were 24 frames per second.
• Setting up the scene: The background texture was in PSD format. It was imported into the Bryce. I chose "marble" as floor. It consisted with the background. Different sizes of cuboids and seventy six balls were on the floor randomly. There were two kinds of balls: black and yellow. Actually the yellow balls should be white. But the yellow balls were more visible than the white ones in this small scene.
• Making an animation: Auto key frames were used in this animation. Five intermedia points were set for animation path of each object. After that, I used preview of the wireframe to check finished animation, and made corrections.
• Rendering the animation: It took over seven hours to render my animation. So far the movie has done, but no sound.

Step 3 -- Willow Pond Media Rack, version 2.20

• The Willow Pond Media Rack was used to convert a sound track file from "MID" format to "wav" format. The format of "wav" was the only format that was accepted by the "AVI Editor".
• The original music was from a game called "TANGCHI". It was an trial version game.

Step 4 -- AVI Editor

• AVI Editor was download from the internet.
• It was used to add soundtrack to the animation. It was also used in compressing the animation. The different setting would give the different size of the movie. I didn't choose the high quality setting because the final size of the file would be over 50MKB.

Step 5 -- Play it !

Summary

The most difficult thing for me in this project was to learn how to use the Bryce trial version 5.0. The layout of this software is not like the others. I spent a lot of time on the Internet searching information of using the software. It's really a challenge for me to get familiar them. It also took me some time to figure out the topic of this 20-second animation. First idea that came to me for the project was not feasible. So I changed to the Feng Shui. The formation of Chinese characters and symbol of "Taiji" was very clear.

These two softwares I used were download from the Internet. The Internet does provide us huge information, and makes our work more convenient. I can't image our life without the internet.

Back to 2002 animations