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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Zaijian
Nobuto Ochiai
Original: Zaijian | 4429 * 3024px | 43.0 MB
I am not an avid watcher of animation, but since I grew up in Japan during the period of the full bloom of Japanese animation, it can be said that I watched them a lot. Japanese animations have been produced in large numbers, from comedy to horror, love story to action.
Among the many genres of animation, the ones I personally enjoyed most and found interesting are the light, relaxing, and entertaining pieces. From my experience, I feel that the conventional 2D animations are best when you want to create relaxed, fantasy oriented works and that they are less effective when you want to create the feeling of extreme stress and intense situation. I am not saying that 2D animation pieces are not emotional. But I personally feel that CG might be the answer to the lack of intensity in conventional animation.The production of Phantom, which used both 3DCG and the 2D animation techniques, gave me the answer. Zaijian is therefore my personal answer to the doubts I have been having about creating "realistic" CG images. I hope that the audience sees at my work as it is, not as a substitute for live-action film, nor a piece to exhibit pure CG skills, but as an entertaining piece of animation.
Zaijian is the demo version of a longer film I hope to produce, so I am not sure how much I have succeeded in expressing the essence of it. I came up with a rough image of the city first, created many scenes in CG and finally edited them into 2 minutes. There are scenes left unused because they did not fit with the others.
Set in an imaginary Asian city, Zaijian tells the story of a boy who is struggling to survive a civil war. In each cut, I concentrated my efforts on Japanese animation-like detailed quality and not on realism. As to the camera, I added CG moves to the conventional live-action film camerawork and tried to make it original.
Among the many genres of animation, the ones I personally enjoyed most and found interesting are the light, relaxing, and entertaining pieces. From my experience, I feel that the conventional 2D animations are best when you want to create relaxed, fantasy oriented works and that they are less effective when you want to create the feeling of extreme stress and intense situation. I am not saying that 2D animation pieces are not emotional. But I personally feel that CG might be the answer to the lack of intensity in conventional animation.The production of Phantom, which used both 3DCG and the 2D animation techniques, gave me the answer. Zaijian is therefore my personal answer to the doubts I have been having about creating "realistic" CG images. I hope that the audience sees at my work as it is, not as a substitute for live-action film, nor a piece to exhibit pure CG skills, but as an entertaining piece of animation.
Zaijian is the demo version of a longer film I hope to produce, so I am not sure how much I have succeeded in expressing the essence of it. I came up with a rough image of the city first, created many scenes in CG and finally edited them into 2 minutes. There are scenes left unused because they did not fit with the others.
Set in an imaginary Asian city, Zaijian tells the story of a boy who is struggling to survive a civil war. In each cut, I concentrated my efforts on Japanese animation-like detailed quality and not on realism. As to the camera, I added CG moves to the conventional live-action film camerawork and tried to make it original.
Nobuto Ochiai (J), born in Hiroshima in 1971, has been a freelance computer graphics animator since 1995. Curreently he works mainly at the Digital Engine Lab, preparing for director Mamoru Oshii's CG film project G.R.M.