After leaving HTC, I have been running this studio for about  6 months now, I have to say that was one of the best thing that happen to me these years. 

So far I'd worked on two children's book animation projects, one TLC TVC, and two motion videos for National Palace Museum.  And now there are two government animation commercials that are in production. 

In the meantime, I am picking up my handcraft tools again. I setup a crystal design Facebook Club in 2015. On this page, I shared some of my handcrafts and hoped people would buy my arts (and I imaged I could be a full-time handcraft artist. ) But it wasn't easy. 

I find that it's impossible to make beautiful things when you feel the urge to achieve something. No matter if it's making animation films, composing music or doing handcrafts. If the starting point is about "earning a lot of money" or "becoming successful" or "gaining followers," usually the project would fail. Even it's a finished piece, the outcome would never be great.  

I am changing my perspective to look at my work, my career and myself. The goal of creating is not about achieving something great, my goal is to create everything with love and passion. The journey of creating can be challenging but it should also be wonderful and meaningful. 

Intention makes a difference.  ​
If I really want to make some efforts to make the world a better place,  I have to implant love into every creation from the start. Place the attention on my projects, my thoughts, my mind and even what I speak. Every image, text, sound and object I create will influence the world in some ways.

You don't have to be meaningful to everyone. 
It's true. No one can please every soul on Earth, not even chocolate. I know we all want to do great things and be a great person, we want to be meaningful. Yes, we can be, but not to the whole world. I want to be meaningful to myself first. Making smartphone commercial animation is not meaningful to me, I decided. So I left. I appreciate the process and the experience, but I understood that it's not what I want to do for life, and there is no reason for me to do the same job for another year, not even another day!   I decided to look up and step out of the comfort zone.  (It was a very nice comfort zone with decent salary and many benefits.)

There you are, wild and free. 
Thanks God, angel, Bodhisattva, Buddha and every spirit in the Universe for helping me making the decision. I will remember to pour my heart into what I create everyday.   
​
​Keep going. 

This is a really basic test of Google ARCore. 
I followed the step-by-step instruction from Google ARCore 's Getting Started with Unity
and the only thing I did was replacing Andy's shadow png into my own dog footprint drawing with the original name. 
(And I "hide" the Andy obj by replacing a random obj file into Unity, the program seemed failed to load it, so it did not show up in the final app.)

I am not a programmer, I know I am stupid. 
​But hey, it works!

Please allow me to remember this moment. 
I might need to come back again and remind myself the feelings and emotion of today. 

I have been confused about why I need to make animation for quite sometime.
To be honest, I hate doing commercial work most of the time. It's not inspiring in many aspects.
( Buy this smartphone! Download this app now! blah blah blah......)
Those commercials and the products are not really benefit to humanity in a long term.
I want to work on something that actually can bring an impact, or be meaningful to someone. 

I believe the mass media has the power to bring positive influence to the public. But what do the public want to see? (Violence and sex, violence and sex, yeah I know.)
But I believe there must be something else that appeals to humans. Something delicate and loving. But I don't know what that is.

I got lost in finding the everyone-will-love-it elements. So I didn't know how to make films.
 
Around a month ago, my friend Emely invited her friends to make birthday cards to her. Emely's mom passed away last year, this was the first birthday that her mom was absent and she needs to be supported.

I was thinking what I could do for her. Then suddenly the idea came to me,
why not making a 360 degree film for her? I always want to use 360 degree film to tell stories.
And it seems perfect! 360 degree films are all about experience in a personal way, I want my friend to feel supported and being loved by the people who care for her. The 360 degree thing might work!

So in just one month, I contact Emely's sister Enid, to help me record down their old family VHS videos. Enid recorded a lot of them, and they were just so perfect ( I could watch these footage and cried without doing any editing. )

I didn't have a solid storyboard, I just made things on the fly, because there wasn't much time.
I started learning C4D two months ago, and learned how to render out 360 degree image (that took a while!) So it's like problem solving throughout the whole production. 
And the file crashed and destroyed last week, I had to remake everything again. I thought I couldn't finished it on time.

The film is kind of experimental, but I tried to put it together.  

Today I finished the film, and I sent it to Emely. 
She said she needed to watched it twice, because the first time her tears blur out everything. (she said they were good tears ><)

I was worried if this project was a bad idea, because I didn't want to upset her, that is totally the opposite of the reason why I made the film. Thank goodness she likes it ><

Therefore, I would like to mark down today. I made a film, not for me, not for the generic public, but for a person I care for. This means a lot to me. And this helps me bring back the passion to make films. Maybe the missing key I was looking for is in here, and I need to go deeper.

Thank you Emely!  

This was a 2D animation scene from the early development of the HTC 10 evo project.
The water would wrap around the smartphone and shrink into a drop.

The shot has been taken out. 

Congrats to Moonshine Animation who crafted the CM Launcher 3D product video beautifully.
This 360 degree video has been announced to be one of the winners of
2016 Red Dot Award: Communication Design.  

Congrats and thank you for the hard work!

Here comes the latest animation filmmaker reel of 2015. Hope you enjoy it!

I don't have a sharp sense when it comes to color. I try different ways to define a color scheme whenever I start an animation project. One of the ways I use is type a keyword into Google image search, capture a screen shot of the result, import into Photoshop and apply the Mosaic effect:

 For example:

warning: There are scary pictures down there...

I typed "日本恐怖片 " (Japanese horror film) into the search bar, and the result is here:
(I mosaiced it a bit, because it's too scary :/)
​

I took a screen shot and import into photoshop, apply Mosaic effect:

And there you go! You got a Japanese style horror film color palette! 
​

This is really fun to play with, so I tried different keywords to see the results. It's interesting to compare different region's horror films.

It's grayish and cold.

It's also grayish but the saturation is heavier than the Japanese horro film.

The colors are more vivid than Japanese or Thai horror film.

Yyou can type in other keywords, such  as:

There is an airy look in Japanese style photography. It's pleasant and relaxing to look at. And notice that Japanese visual style is usually cold and light.

And of course, Wes Anderson's movie color palette. His movies are often warm and light. (And he likes pink, doesn't he?)

His use of color is warm yet saturated, and it's quite heavy. If you add a bit gray into this color scheme, you could also create a horror film color palette...

I don't know if this method will help or not, but it's fun to play with and try out. 
​

If you're interested in learning more about color palette in movies ,here is a great site:

And if you're intrested in finding out populr color scheme at the moment, here is a free tool online:
​Adobe Color CC

If you have any other technique to build your color palette, please share with me :)

After almost three years. Snow Boat had reached its final destination. Today we release the whole film online. Thanks to everyone who worked so hard on this piece and thanks to SCAD, my second home on Earth. We will continue make animations and do the best we can :)

Today I finished the set of Ken's living room. Although the camera won't reveal too much detail of the set, I still wanted to add little objects, such as the plugs, into the set.

And here are some decor for the walls.

And somehow the set became very crowded when I placed the two Kens into the scene...

I guess I can try to cheat it on camera.

No animation done today.

So here is another tiny shot I did for the whole animation.

 I built a simple set to mimic the shooting game scenario and used the plastic soldiers and guns to be the props. ​

And I added some nonsense props to be part of the interface.

Looks dumb, but this is how it supposed to be.