Rebirth

July 2020 till now

Conceptual Animation

Project Overview

Rebirth was an experimental animation I made in my spare time because I needed to expand my portfolio for my PhD application in 2022. It’s still in production, but I wanted to show it. I used a purely hand-drawn method to make this 2D animation. The style and pacing of this animation is a tribute to one of my favorite artists, Basquiat. I like Basquiat’s rough and emotional paintings, but he is also a very charitable artist. But Basquiat’s untimely death made me very sorry, so I named this experimental animation Rebirth in honor of Basquiat.

Survey

Jean Michel Basquiat was an American artist who achieved great success in the 1980s. As one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he was part of the New Expressionist movement. Basquiat first made his name as a member of Samo, the graffiti duo that in the late 1970s created mystical collections of poetry in the cultural hotbeds of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where rap, punk and street art merged into early hip-hop. By the early 1980s, his paintings were exhibited in international galleries and museums.At the age of 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist ever to participate in the Documenta in Kassel. At 22, he was the youngest person to attend the Whitney Biennial in New York.The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his work in 1992. Basquiat’s art focuses on dichotomies, such as wealth and poverty, integration and segregation, and inner and outer experience. He excels in poetry, drawing and painting, and combines words and images, abstract, symbolic and historical information with contemporary criticism. He used social commentary as a tool of introspection in his paintings and defined himself based on his experiences in the black community of the time and his attacks on power structures and racist institutions. His visual poetics is politically sensitive and direct in criticizing colonialism and supporting class struggle.

Concept

I really like Basquiat’s skull paintings.As I was looking for inspiration, I found several angles in his skull paintings .So I immediately had the idea of animating them as spinning skulls.

As soon as the idea was established, I collected a lot of Basquiat’s head paintings and studied his primitive and barbaric way of painting. I think Basquiat’s painting style is very expressive, which is also a rejection of traditional art forms.I have to say that getting the smooth rotation of the skull is a very difficult task, at least for me. Because I wanted to imitate Basquiat’s painting style, but also to take into account the different angles of the human skull as it rotates. It took me about two weeks, and I made about 300 pictures on Photoshop with a hand-painted board. I think it’s very difficult to master Basquiat’s style of painting, because it sometimes feels like you’re fiddling or doodling. I sometimes feel the same way when I look at this work.

When I was halfway through the skull, I wanted to get this piece to 2-3 minutes. I wanted to add more elements to express my memory for Basquiat. Since Basquiat died young, I wanted to make the creative point of the whole work rebirth. When people think of rebirth, they think of a story of an object or a person rising up after a setback or failure. As far as I’m concerned, children and jellyfish are things that keep growing. Even if they encounter difficulties and setbacks, they will eventually thrive in a healthy environment. This is in line with the spirit of equality and fraternity advocated by Basquiat, so I continue to depict the growth process of jellyfish and children with Basquiat’s painting style in my work. For example, the process of the human being in the video being transformed from a cell into a human form and falling down is a process of human growth. The most difficult problem in painting is how to make smooth and creative transitions, such as from skull to fish or fish to jellyfish. I inquired a lot of similar animation works and 3D works, and finally determined the current transition mode. That is, the subject matter of the previous act gradually dispersing and converging to form the subject matter of the next act.

So far, this work is still in the process of creation, especially what elements to add to continue to expand it is a headache for me.

Moodboard

When I first conceived this work, I simply wanted to make Basquiat’s series of head paintings move. Since I was an animation student when I first came to SCAD, I wanted to be able to redraw them with my hands. And I personally think that 3D modeling is not suitable for Basquiat’s work, because too many messy lines and colors can only be expressed in 2D style.

Painting Process

So far, I’ve done about a thousand pictures. I also abandoned some of the paintings, such as the shifting arms on the right. In the process of painting, I want to use these arms and jellyfish to make some transitions and at the same time express the creative idea of division and integration. But in the end I decided that the growth of the baby was better than the arms, so I threw it away.

Color Palette

Final Scenes