City of Darkness reflection

 Reflection on City Of Darkness

One thing that underwent the most change was the character design of the protagonist, Nezumi. I knew early on I wanted the main character to be a young girl, as this would reflect Hayao Miyazakis style and how he often choses to focus the story on children, often girls.

Her purpose was also something I couldn't quite think of. Originally I was inspired by a photograph of children playing on the roof of Kowloon, as well as a postman delivering letters down the dark corridors of the city. 

After this I was also inspired by the tales of rats found often roaming the streets, I thought I could incorporate a curse that takes the form of a rat or mouse, and I wanted to work this into the main characters design

I ended up really liking her design, and even created concept art and a coloured turnaround as I was really set on her looks.

However as I struggled more with the story aspect, I found that her appearance seemed out of place and looked too mouse like before she would have been cursed, which I felt may have been confusing or not make enough sense. I opted to keep her grey hair, and used the ears and face markings in her semi-transformed version. I ended up ditching the yellow coat all together. 

Her final design I felt fit the improved and solid storyline, and didn't stand out so much against the setting, which had a large eastern influence. While I still kept the cloak style, I feel the newer colour pallet and style of the cloak worked best. I also swill wanted her and the shrine maiden to look different visually, so I opted for a shorter cloak which would also give her more freedom of movement.
 

The setting I feel was one thing I did well with the project, as I knew from early on what I wanted the setting to be, and I had a lot of visual references to draw inspiration from. I also started work on the backgrounds quite early on, so overall I felt quite happy with the quality of my backgrounds 

One thing I struggled with was creating a story that would highlight the technique I recognized in my analysis of Hayao Miyazaki's work. I wanted to create contrast and a force of disequilibrium within the city but I wasn't quite sure how to best contrast this. I think choosing a movie trailer format did help me a little in this regard as often a trailer will only hints at elements of a story without giving away too much information. once I had a basic story outline I felt more confident in moving forward with the animation of the story.

One element I really wanted to incorporate from an early point of the project was a downward scrolling parallax shot of the cramped buildings, that would also reveal the character at the end of the shot. 

Originally I had the idea of the camera following the protagonist up a rising platform as she navigates the city delivering packages, however as the story and background of the character changed I felt that while it would have been a really cool shot it no longer matched the story. I also originally imagined this scene taking place in the early morning with the bustle of the morning rush, however eventually I geared the project towards being set at night to better set the mood of the animation, and would make the overall contrasting element work more effectively. 

I had also worked with parallax the previous year for research, however I was unhappy with the end result as I felt elements looked as they were drifting, as I attempted a zoom in parallax, which I felt was harder to pull of in a believable way, so I wanted to try a Vertical parallax instead to get a better result. My second idea was the perspective falling from the rooftops to the street where the protagonist would be shrouded in shadow and darkness, which I felt set the tone of the story much more.