After much thought, while researching Chinese stories, I’ve come to realize I still love my original idea of doing my BFA project on the story “Journey to the West”. I think it’s a nice ending to my final year in college since my very first assignment from my first AMP class was color and painting and I painted Sun Wukong (one of the main character from the story).
My plan still stands about it being an animated interaction piece but I held back a little because I’m not very familiar with coding or even Javascript. But hopefully, with some help from other faculty members who are familiar with Javascript and much more thorough research, I can complete the project.
I want to introduce the audience to the wonderful story and beautiful characters that are in the story but time is limited and there are many characters so I will only focus on the main characters and they are:
Xuanzang; He is the monk traveling to the west to achieve enlightenment.
- His colors will consist of: red, brown, green, and blue
Sun Wukong: Punished and trapped by Buddha, he is forced to accompany and protect Xuanzang on his journey to the west.
- His colors will consist of: red, orange, and blue
Zhu Bajie once, a well-respected Commander for the Heavenly Army in the Jade emperors kingdom he is punished for flirting with the Moon Goddess, Chang’e
- His colors will consist of: purple, and orange.
Sha Wujing once, a general assignment to hold the celestial curtain he is punished and banned for breaking a crystal goblet.
- His colors will consist of: Blue, purple, and brown.
These are the four main characters that I will focus on as each of them symbolize different characteristics of humanity like Dante’s Inferno. Zhu Bajie is gluttonous and greedy for food and women, Sun Wukong is mischievous and selfish and Sha Wujing is careless and sometimes unmotivated.
I assigned them colors based on the meaning of Feng Shui since in Chinese Opera their colorful customs are based on the colors in Feng Shui. I am also going to include and mix my own take and meaning behind each other and possibly fit more to their characteristics but these are the basics for their color palette.
Instead of illustrating a full chapter of one of their adventures I will only do an introductory type story.
It will be on a website and the first opening scene will show clouds and it will open up to the many levels of the heavenly empire. Each location will be related to the “origin” story of each character an example will be Sun Wukong was a monkey born from a rock so there will be rock resting towards the lower level of the heavenly empire and when your mouse over to the rock, the rock will rattle and it will split open revealing a fully grown golden monkey.
This will be the same for all of the characters each one of them will be linked to an item and they will pop open revealing each character. Once the character pops out a short animated sequence will begin, illustrating their part and how they got to be part of the group. The animated sequence will be entirely based on the color palette that I’ve selected for them.
I will be using the following programs:
Adobe Illustrator; making the characters and movable props.
Photoshop: To add textures to the characters and movable props, i.e Sun Wukong’s rock. I will also use Photoshop to paint the main opening scene and their backgrounds.
After Effects: used to assemble all of the animations.
Javascript: to bring the entire project to life.
Finally, I haven’t decided on what website to host all of this yet but I don’t think it’s entirely important as of yet.
Some link I’ve used:
http://www.feng-shui-and-beyond.com/feng-shui-colors.html
https://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-10945/what-each-color-means-in-feng-shui.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_West
(I’m aware wiki is not a valid source for information but, it has the basics of the story. I am working on finding more credible sources for information regarding the stor.)