THE WATCHER
Experimental Animation, Motion Graphic
For my project, "The Watcher," I was inspired by Freud’s study on the three aspects of human personality: the Ego, the Id, and the Superego. We generally know about the ego and the superego, but, through my research, I found that many people didn’t know about the Id. I therefore chose to focus my project in the Id.
So, what is the id? Simply speaking, the id is all about human instinct from nature. Our desire and our ambition are both derived from the Id, and even our creativity partially comes from the Id. But, what if this human instinct dominates our personality? What would then happen? My project starts from this question.
To visually represent the ego against the id, I played around with colours, light, and shadows. I kept my piece black and white to emphasize lights and shadow – light andwhite represents the ego, and the shadows and the black represents the id.
I wanted to portray the harmony of living with both light and shadow in the same way our personality is a balance of ego and id, against the shadows.but also show what could happen if this balance was disrupted. Continuing on with my theme of light versus shadows, I represented this disruption of balance with an eclipse – one way of allowing shadow to completely consume all light.
I had experience with Maya but wanted to use Cinema 4D to create my environmental assets to really learn this tool. I did motion tests with Sketch & Toon, with lots of iterations on the assets to get the look I wanted. I wanted to make something flat-shaped to look like 2D graphics in 3D space. The reason I did this was because 3D shapes have gradients and shading and, because light and shadows was such a focus of my storytelling, I didn’t want the shading to distract the viewer from the impact of the light
