BACKGROUND

When I first came to CityU, I wanted to study film and visual effects.  In high school, I was geared more towards live-action productions and treated animated “cartoons” as an immature afterthought.  I liked the old classics, such as Totoro and Disney movies, but generally regarded them as childish and simplistic, not to mention that the thought of working every single frame at 24fps was a colossally inefficient way of making film.  Many news articles that I read seemed to affirm this: that 2D animation was on the decline and 3D animation and CGI was the future.  

Things changed halfway through my studies as I came to realize how saturated the CGI market had become.  Second, as I did more theoretical research and hands-on experimentation, the more I realized that many fundamental aspects of 3D animation (such as walk cycles and weight) had remained the same irrespective of animation medium.  Exposure to deeper, more philosophical animated films such as Ghost in the Shell and The Wind Rises dispelled the notion that animated films were “for kids only”; in a stunning twist, I learned that Ghost in the Shell actually was a fundamental inspiration for The Matrix.  

Drawing characters frame by frame, the aspect of traditional animation that I had feared so much and as a result had repressed and shunned, eventually turned out to be its greatest strength and most mesmerizing experiences of all to me as an artist.  Up to that point, I painted motion only in general, sweeping broadstrokes with keyframes and interpolation, and had been left wondering why my animations felt insipid and dull, uninspiring and lifeless.  In comparison, the experience of seeing a pencil-drawn character slowly come to life is difficult to describe with words; one experiences a passionate mixture of exhaustion and euphoria, hatred and love; unlike live shooting, where a director learns to make use of whatever Lady Fortune leaves at his disposal, one watches one’s animation in the knowledge that nothing was left to chance, that there was conscious thought behind every brush stroke and nuance.  

By the time I had fully fallen in love with traditional animation, I was conflicted.  I still liked live-action films for their photorealism and cinematography, but at the same time, the animated classics beckoned me with visions of fantastical castles in the sky and a magically surreal, psychedelic allure that live-action, by nature, could not easily replicate.

Guardian Angel therefore can be said to be an attempt to be a bridge between both worlds.