作品名称 Project Title : The Nine-Coloured Deer: The Merchant

简介 Description:

Of the four Chinese mythological tales presented by the students at the Luxun Academy of Fine Art, I was initially drawn to the twin possibilities of rigging for metamorphosis and for bird locomotion, presented by ‘Jingwei Filling the Sea’. However, after some initial research I changed focus, becoming captivated by the potential I saw in a number of elements of ‘The Nine-Coloured Deer’. As a Buddhist Jataka tale which would have originally travelled to China from India by way of the Silk Road, the myth had elements of Indian culture depicted through a Chinese lens. This cross-cultural communication gave me enticing opportunities in terms of historical research, starting with the Mogao Cave murals and Silk Road history, through to different cultural depictions of colour and clothing.

A further key inspiration derived from the epithet of one of the central characters. The treacherous, betraying figure who tells of the Deer’s whereabouts, was referred to in several transcripts of the Mogao Cave mural’s tale, as simply ‘the Drowning Man,’ a merchant on the Silk Road [Chang, L., 2023, CHN Museums, 2023, Confucius Institute for Scotland, 2026]. This epithet brought to mind a more horrific, fantastical twist to his eventual betrayal, karmic transformation and possible fate, which I was keen to explore.

To expand upon the ‘Drowning Man’ set, I began sketching some initial ideas, and gathering visual and written research on the Mogao Caves; Dunhuang; and the Silk Road. My early research focused on the ‘discovery’ of the Mogao caves in the early 1900s by Sir Aurel Stein, and how his expeditions had brought the artworks and cultural artefacts of Dunhuang out of a thousand-year slumber, by both fair means and foul [Haas, H., 2026].

In this project, my goal was to develop an enhanced understanding of rigging for 2D production, particularly within a ToonBoom-based workflow. Having previously worked across various departments in the industry, primarily on CelAction-based shows, I had a basic understanding of puppet rigging technique and its importance in the pipeline, but lacked practical experience in its application. As the brief called for two areas of experimentation, I also chose to produce the character designs I would be rigging, and so mimic the pre-production to production process. By following these two successive stages of animated character development, my end goal was to increase my proficiency in design and rigging through iteration and experimentation, and to produce an industry-level final result in a fully-realised character rig.

使用软件 Tools Used: ToonBoom Harmony, Adobe Photoshop CC