Animator Shocked by Chinese Animation Discovery - Fog Hill of Five Elements Analysis

[Applause] my name is howard wimshurst and i spend a lot of time creating hand-drawn animation as a professional animator it's important to learn from the best animations in the world i'm taking you with me on these research sessions so you can see how i learn you are watching sakuga studies [Music] guys do not sleep on chinese animation i'm telling you some of these modern chinese films are changing the landscape of animation right now like they're setting the bar way up here so let's take a look at them let's study them let's break them down i think this is going to be really interesting to take a deep dive on these animations [Music] fog hill of five elements in the animated guild community discord group where we share all of our inspirations we link to different videos we see on the internet i can scroll through there and about one in every four posts is fog hill of five elements so it's an incredibly popular piece of animation in the niche of 2d animation already but i think with the mainstream audiences i think a lot of people in the west do not know about fog hill of the five elements yet nice can't understand the words but i love the illustrations these are looks so nice i love the bleeding effects they're doing using masks if you want to try this for yourself you can you can call it water on ink or ink drop and you do this by painting the canvas first with water and then using a pipette to just drop colored ink onto the page and it's a beautiful technique and it's a really nice technique to watch as well it's got this lovely aesthetic quality to it you can do this in adobe after effects fairly easily actually using ink drop footage to populate the positive space of your image all right i've pulled in a few just random sketches i had on my computer into after effects just to demonstrate how you can do this so this is what it looks like just by itself these are just the different ink drops here and i sped up the footage i scaled it way up so that basically the effect is covering the full screen i'll start with this one i'll show you what this one looks like this is just with a few a line sketch and i added a bit of color in there as well just to spice things up the bottom layer i inverted it first of all instead of blacking it out it's illuminating it i put the ink drop video footage on the layer below set it to luma inverted matte this one's also luma inverted matte i hid the sketch layer on the top layer this is what it looks like normally set that to color dodge or classic color dodge yeah so it just adds in on the rims and places just these nice vibrant colors and so that's what that one looks like the sketches where i've added a little bit of mid tones works a lot better so instead of it just being white black i added some mid-tones in this one and this is what this looks like so this to me looks much nicer because on those mid-tones that's when you actually see that ink drop texture come through you can see it spread with a lot more clarity love the sound the cinematic music the it's taking its time to set the scene and create that ambient atmosphere nice frozen lake where you can see the reflections of the characters above and below creates a really serene effect let's go [Music] that's cool with the blood hot blood nice slow motion nice cool i like the reflection in the sword it was a nice touch wow the animation keyframes are so vigorous they're really pushed to their extremes it creates a very very powerful animation look at that that is really really very cool shot to track up on this character and see the transformation sparks flying around i love all those little details like that this brush work on this character there's actually kind of filling in the blank spaces you can see on the on areas like the chest and the neck and it's contouring it's kind of contouring the shape of the body adding that gritty texture it's very high contrast so it really jumps out of the page because of that high contrast we've got also the glows of these uh nice um symbols almost like tattoos on the body and it really just makes the whole image pop you can see they're layered with some glow effects as well so a lot of care has been put into the compositing as well as into the keyframes of this the pride in the work and the level of care it's very impressive [Music] nice lens flare in the eye again more ink drop uh effects going on [Music] i love the contrast between fire and ice they're really playing off of these this duality they're at different sides of the color spectrum hot and cold it makes it really easy to track which character is which because in a lot of this choreography they're circling each other like this and that can be very difficult to track for the audience to track which character is in which position if there isn't a significant color difference this problem is essentially solved nice pose straight to that pose open chest pose loads of energy very clear readable silhouettes that was creative i like that he obviously said something important there but i couldn't understand it but whatever it was was important i'm sure again with the masking this time of the character line art they've masked in this kind of glitter effect kind of a callback to traditional essentially with glue and a gold glitter you can create these shimmering um golden lines and it just looks really striking to to look at i love that these voice actors don't hold back do they yeah certain camera angles camera movements that are used and even certain moves in hand-to-hand combat that i have seen from anime but the other place where i'm convinced foghill of five elements takes a lot of influence from and one that i would recommend you research is wushu wushu is chinese martial arts and the really amazing thing about wushu which i love about it is that there is a strong emphasis on performance they're not really functional movements a lot of the time they're for dramatic effect so there's a lot of acrobatics involved just the really amazing choreography and i think that fog killer five elements takes a lot of inspiration from wushu and probably a lot of reference as well singapore 2015. let's go wow good start oh and how do they not injure themselves doing that that was cool electrifying really electrifying performance this is a wonderful piece of reference footage there's just a lot to unpack even in less than two seconds of animation we can see so many amazing rich poses so i'm gonna do a frame by frame analysis of this clip so and all in all it's very good value for money when you compare it to the wycombe brand there's a lot of motion blur on this and that's because of the shutter speed that the camera was set at in a way it kind of helps like if you understand anatomy already then you can already kind of fill in the gaps that are missed from the motion blur and the motion blur is actually giving really good indications of the speed of each part of the the body and the directional movement of it so it's actually really nice to have those signals in there so i actually like footage that is shot at a low shutter speed so this is what the clip looks like so he kind of gets clotheslined by this kick and there's a lot of cool poses i can identify in this this isn't the most extreme pose i could find but it's a pretty good starting point i guess and this guy you know you could do speed lines just like that to show the relative speed of of him running past this is where it gets fun here so of course them being performers they're not actually hitting each other and that's very clear when you slow it down you can see that he he jumps into this and he's already setting himself up to fall backwards now all we would do in animation to tweak that give it a lot of impact is to um to actually delay these poses that he's making where he's jumping up into the air until after he makes contact with the foot what i later did which i can show you in these drawings that i made i leaned him way forwards angled the whole body forwards like that and i kept that forwards angle right until his face met that shin in that kick this part i had to improvise again because in the footage he was off camera you can see this the setup to that kick is off camera by the time he comes onto the camera the leg is already up there i just imagined him winding up with this leg having the leg kind of whip round like this and to meet him there and to have this kind of twist element in the body you can see that the the body has twisted that way which has given it a lot of power in that twist obviously i want a frame i want a keyframe which really describes the impact i'm always keen on having a frame where there is the full impact where you can even see his uh face squashing into the shin and then past that i decided to really exaggerate this because what you're seeing with this is the performers they want to heighten it to its to its fullest they want to go as extreme as possible in these moves make them super dramatic and they've done a really good job with that but of course they can't go much further than that without hurting each other so here you see he's done a great job at flying really high into the air like he is off the ground there like really high off the ground which is amazing he's doing amazing performance because this that i imagine would hurt he puts his arms down to meet the ground so that some of the impact is taken out of the full but he's jumped from from here so this must have been quite difficult he must have really braced himself for this fall afterwards he has this kind of secondary bounce like his body actually bounces off the floor and i thought that's really cool i like the fact that when his body met the ground it bounced i wonder if i can just accelerate that and make it even more so with this one um i'll play it for you so he does a really big bounce um and i'm imagining it's just like brick floor or something or or you know it's like earth and bits of earth are coming up um with him and he just fully flips over like the bounce is completely accelerated and then uh just while i was doodling i did a treat so he slams into a tree as well just to uh push it further so obviously these frames are spaced really far apart because this is just a this is just rough planning for a piece of animation it's not the animation itself but you should hopefully be able to see how it flows how it moves my favorite poses are probably with the kick here i love that this arm is extended out really far that way which has given the body this twist the leg is very far up guys very flexible we've got some really nice gestural curves on this leg that is planting him on the ground and then coming down from that i didn't actually take from these poses even though i really like them in a different situation where i chose different camera moves and stuff i would have taken these poses but this is just such a strong pose look at his fist curled up there his really strong power stance with his leg coming back down to the ground i just love the gesture in this pose i love the strength in his body language he's a great performer and just the way he just effortlessly crosses that foot over there all of these poses that he's going through are really graceful and powerful all of them so that's just a tiny tiny part of this choreography this was the first development i did of this study i quite liked this one but i thought the start could be done differently i changed the angle and so this is what i made and this really deviated quite far from the reference footage the same move the same kick like clothesline kick but in a different way so that's what this looks like so i added i kept the ending the same i created a blue red contrast so you can just see who the characters are to make it more clear and added a little bit of fun effects animation added the camera shake a little bit of camera tilt and camera movement there and most importantly created a different angle at the start just something that i thought would be interesting where you can see both characters in frame whereas with the previous one uh you could only see one character in the frame and then the other one just goes through really fast but you can't you don't really get a chance to see him with this it's kind of pivoting around him and then the camera moves off and follows the follows the victim i'm a big fan of wushu and i'm pretty sure that a lot of these chinese animation studios they are very influenced by wushu and by wushiya so wushiya is like chinese mythology chinese superheroes and it's it's fascinating it's a really fascinating topic so chinese animation there is a history to chinese animation and i want to show you a little taste of that here i'm going to show you a very famous animated film from the 1960s called havoc in heaven let's watch a little bit of havoc in heaven now uh just so you can get a feel for chinese animation history [Music] really beautiful very inspired by disney at the time [Music] but also brings something to animation [Music] hopefully you're starting to connect the dots here [Applause] that was wonderful wow [Music] anyway i don't want to spoil the rest of the film and have my face in the corner i think you should go and watch it's well worth your time to watch havoc in heaven to see a really great hallmark of chinese cinema and chinese animation so fog hill of five elements it feels very much like a showcase of the 2d animation ability i haven't really followed the storyline of this animation i'm just admiring it from a technical standpoint it is very well made and i love that it's sticking to its roots i can feel the callbacks to traditional chinese scroll art in this these lush painterly backgrounds with these ornate trees and buildings it's so nice to have it rooted in that because i appreciate that so much of chinese artwork is that is the history of chinese artwork one of the things that stands out immediately is the thick brushstrokes outline instead of the thin anime line aesthetic which we see as kind of a mainstream staple in animation and it means that on these very fast uh scenes we have this brush strokes which give it this natural hand-drawn motion blur which i'm a big fan of fight scenes are the thing that draw a lot of people in because they're dynamic it's fast it's exciting and then you have these slower moments these character moments which they're still working on i feel but as they improve on the character animation and those moments those are going to be the things that make you stay and make you really connect with the film on a more emotional level it's borrowing elements of anime but it's also adding something more it brings chinese culture it brings chinese artistry and a diff a slightly different flavor of drawing style and a complexity which is very refreshing very nice to see in the next part of my chinese animation mini series i will be looking at hong kong impact third so subscribe to the channel so that you don't miss it and hit the notification icon just to make sure

Channel: Howard Wimshurst

Views: 91,109

Keywords: Fog Hill of Five Elements, fog hill, fog hill analysis, fog hill bridge scene, fog hill animation analysis, animation analysis, sakuga studies, sakuga react, how to make sakuga animation, how to make sakuga action scene, how to animate a fight scene, how to make dynamic action, how to draw a fight scene, how to animate combat, fog hill of the five elements animation breakdown, animation reaction, chinese animation, chinese anime

Id: KS3poLLIWhs

Length: 22min 35sec (1355 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 06 2021