春Vitality

Springtime river's high water rises to sea level. Bright moon emerges from sea along with tide.

Collaborative project by Qianhui Wan and Yuxiao Wang.

From ancient pictographs to today's fusion of text and graphics, the written word has cycled from complexity to simplicity and back. The functionality of text persists, evolving for deeper visual and emotional expression. Using graphical text, we recreate the sentiments of spring and lovesickness from the famous ancient Chinese poem "The Moonlit Night of Spring Flowers." This exploration delves into text expressiveness in terms of both readability and visual impact.

FEATURE ANIMATION

The feature of the project was a 1 minute animation demonstrate the poem.

It starts with a motion illustration of the big scene. As the camera zooms in, the elements start to transform into characters, and they will form the poem in the end.

thumbnail of the opening scene

animatic

concept illustration

After Effects

All the elements from the illustration had been exported as png. separately, so we can animate them by adding rigs in After Effects.

LOOPING GIF

Part of the project showcasing the transition from pictograph to modern form of Chinese characters.

The four characters — 潮(tide), 月(moon), 海(ocean), 生(live) — were chosen from the poem "The Moonlit Night of Spring Flowers," and were the four key elements in this scene.

潮 Tide

海 Ocean

月 Moon

生 Live

Besides the four main characters, we also selected ten other images as auxiliary text-pictograph elements to present around.

WOOD STAMPS

An interactive session has also been added to allow visitors to participate in the exhibition.

We split the pictographs and their corresponding characters from the looping gifs into components and made them as wood stamps using laser cutting. We also printed cards in riso with our word marks on them.

The audience could combine characters by preference and create their own cards as take-away items.

WORDMARK

For wardmark, we chose to work with the Chinese character 春(spring), which is also the title of our project.

It turns out that the previous design might be too complicated and literal, which cannot express our concept the best. So we determined to make a concise but more graphic.