Cold Like the Sun: A Work in Progress



And that's more or less it (for now).

Obviously this is an unfinished work, a not even close to finished work.

I’ve been really, really sick throughout the whole semester and was unable to fulfill what were challenging but reasonable goals when I’d set them for myself and before all of this happened. (This is so upsetting for me, and I hate to have been so incapacitated as to be unable to work on something that I've desperetely wanted to.)

However, I will be finishing this.

Even if no one sees it, it’s still very important to me. So please check on this URL in the fall if this project interests you! Please also feel free to check out my website linked below if you'd like to see my prior, more finished work.

>>Personal Gallery [data-heavy, beware mobile users]<<

More info about this project and what it's planned to be continues below.




Vision



Technical Details

This work is planned to be a loopable animation roughly four minutes in length. The assets will be painted in Photoshop then be rigged and animated in Cubism Live2D with potential supplemental animation done in After Effects, in particular for the environment. Scenes will then be built and edited in Premiere. The animation will have atmospherically appropriate music sourced from royalty free artists.

Description

This will be a looping character animation that heavily uses elements of nature as the central aesthetic. The work is intended to be broadly beautiful and utilize many elements of nature that people generally find attractive, such as flowers, lightning, celestial bodies, rainfall, snow, birds in flight, etc. However, the work will also be underscored with macabre or slightly unsettling representations of the death, disease, and destruction that are also inherent to nature. The character at the center of the animation will take the form of a young woman. She is intended to be reminiscent of a superhuman mythical figure. Though she appears human, her personality will be detached and passive to the environment around her despite her role in its cycle. The environment will have some temporal elements. It will shift through the seasons (not the California type, the kind that has snow and storms) but over the course of a single sun and moon day cycle. Several animals will also pass in and out of the animation. The animation will be presented as a simple HD video with audio.



Current Progress



Storyboard and Design
Sketching All Assets
>Painting All Foreground Assets<
Painting All Background Assets
Dividing Assets for Rigging
Importing and Prepping File
Rigging
Animating Scenes
Editing Scenes Together
Adding Music
Any Final Polish




Asset Progress









Storyboard and Character Design


Storyboard

storyboard
scene begins at night under a setting moon
a female figure rises slowly from the snow, branches rise around her, snow drops off her figure as she rises
full scene zooms out as moon frames character, who fades into it as she rises to upright
zoom on face as hair falls away, expression is distant
wings begin to unfurl from behind the character, branches close around her figure in a snowy garment
full scene as wings extend completely, melted snow forms more of a garment
zoom on quarter view to show wings to be of a goose, who lifts in flight behind the character
more geese fly past the character from bottom left
zoom on pool as more rain begins to fall
zoom on profile as wind kicks up and stirs figure's hair
zoom above head to show heavy clouds rolling into frame, hair swirls higher
a crack of lightning consume the screen
sudden full zoom out, character raises hands as lightning frames her
lightning forms a crown around the character and leaves behind a crown of moose antlers
zoom on one antler side, as rain continues to fall, begins to collect in bowl of antler
water lily blooms in puddle and rain overflows from crown
dark birds rise from the rising puddle and ascend around the character
birds fly upward trailing water behind them, flower blossoms sprout upon the areas past which the birds have flown
cracks appear in antlers, rain abates, water overflow slows to a trickle
view pans down as character raises arm, capelet of birds hung like game hangs from her arm, parts of antler crumble away
bird capelet melts into a winglike shape and ascends
zoom on branches as blossoms form and bloom, melted mass continues ascent
zoom out on full scene as garment blossoms, mass edges melt into butterflies, crown branches begin to twist into bird nests
zoom on nests, full with variety eggs, branches continue to twist, last of butterflies leave
nests begins to collapse and eggs roll out, some hatch in midair
shells fall to rocks, some eggs shatter without hatching
view on branches falling
baby bird turns into adult bird with single stroke of wings and ascends
sun frames character, with velvety antlers
antlers shed velvet, like melting blood
antler waste turns into mice as it hits the rocks
mice run up character's legs and into the flowers of her garment
character pulls inward, branches conform around her and flowers detatch and suspend for a moment in air
flowers turn gray as they fall, rabbits emerge from largest blossoms, turning inside out and disappearing as the tail fluff
antlers begin to fully disintegrate
shards of antlers turn into leaves as they fall
fox nose emerges from leaves gathered on ground
rabbits flee, dashing over and behind character
character shelters one rabbit in her arms, fox pursues rabbits
fox dashes behind character, rabbit hides its face in the crook of character's elbow
zoom out on scene, rabbit relaxes, but fox tail swishes behind character now as though hers, clouds again appear
zoom on lower face, fox tail swishes, fireflies emerge from garment
zoom on hands, rabbit turns white and character releases it
character begins to lean forward as snow collects on her
character folds forward as in sleep, paw enters frame and steps onto the snow on character
snow now completely covers figure, wolf has fully descended
wolf's figure distorts into snow
wolf's figure falls into snow
loop back to beginning


Character Design




Previous Live2D Work



Unlike the aforementioned previous iteration, I am more comfortable with the program that will be used to animate this one, and I feel it's better suited for the job. Some of my previous Live2D work can be seen below.

>>The Balance (interactive website, 2017)<<
>>Etoile (vtuber model, 2020)<<
>>sprites for Fragments (a game collaboration with Julie Jacobson, 2020)<<
>>Luna (splash animation for personal gallery, 2020)<<


Artist Bio



Meghan Landry was born in Maryland, grew up in rural Illinois, and in 2016 moved to San Jose, California. She has maintained an interest in drawing and crafting since early childhood. She attends San Jose State University as a Digital Media Art student.

Meghan's broad yet distractible curiosity has led her to pick up many different kinds of media, both digital and traditional, but digital tools and software are where most of her time is spent. She is primarily a character illustrator using Photoshop and a graphics tablet. She also has an interest in organic sculpting in ZBrush, animation in Live2D and After Effects, and web coding, generally all to the end of adapting or enhancing her illustrations. She highly regards technical proficiency and aims to set and achieve certain visions for her art on a technical and personal aesthetic level and to be perpetually learning and critically evaluating her work. She continues to create and explore art as the function of a basic drive to do so.


Artist Statement



I am a digital illustrator first and foremost, but I love to explore all sorts of different tools and media to create new things. I’m continually working to improve my technical skills and further develop a defined personal aesthetic. I specialize in fantasy character and creature depictions and designs and more often than not feature them front and center in my art. My goal as an artist is to work as a character designer, illustrator, or sculptor for games, and a lot of my art is also practice in that pursuit. I find gaming to be a powerful and ever-evolving narrative tool that lets its audience connect with characters and ideas and worlds in a more personal and effective way that’s difficult to achieve with more passive media.

The basis for my illustrations is usually soft, flowing, and beautiful with a peaceful and comforting atmosphere that can be enjoyed on a surface level. However, I like to also include darker or deeper themes through a warping of something conventionally beautiful or as a beautiful idealization of an ugly or uncomfortable idea. I think we sometimes might hold our lizard brain in contempt, but I see it as a potential gateway to more enthusiastically engage with difficult ideas.

I keep politics and social issues subtle, but death, feminism, and self expression are not uncommon sources of inspiration. I’m fascinated and terrified by my own and our species’ collective mortality, and I find art to be an excellent tool to work through the web of ideas around that topic in particular and find a universal means of connection through the discussion of a shared fate. Similarly, the social policing of women’s bodies and behavior is always something on my mind when creating character art, and I hope my art serves as an act of reclamation, both of the female form and of some elements of once oppressive traditional femininity.

Cold Like the Sun is intended to be an animated digital painting created with Photoshop, Live2D, and Premiere. It very, very loosely responds to modern admiration of all things superficially “natural” and the anti-human, anti-science sentiment stemming from it. The character is not exactly a personification of nature, but more a superhuman idolic representative of it. While fantasy portrayals of characters like these tend to be gentle, wise guardians, this narrative aims to present its character as equally alluring but also detached and uncaring, a passive perpetuator of life and death, neither good nor evil. This is mostly inspiration and an undercurrent to the work, and the animation is intended to be entertaining and reflective without needing the aforementioned context.

Unfortunately, barely prior to the start of the semester and this work, I received a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. While I’m lucky that this type of cancer is often curable and that it was caught at an early stage, it still means six months of chemotherapy, presently ongoing. Every other Thursday morning, I’m given a handful of pills and then injected with life-saving poison for six hours. The side effects are not minor and the Pavlovian response is so strong that I feel ill and panicked even writing this brief statement about it.

Thus, my grand and carefully planned idea has resulted in this, my best effort, full of anger and shame and hurting pride. It’s a hodgepodge of loose ends and unfinished work, desperately trying to be everything I wanted and inevitably failing. Even so, I hope this mess can act as a catalyst for hope and potential because, while May 7th is a delivery date my fulfilled vision will miss, I will certainly see this project through to the end, just maybe a couple months late.