Faces of Culture

Description:      

     This animation was meant to be an entry to Globaltronics' first ever National Digital Arts Awards and it won first place in the motion graphics student category. Besides that, I took it as a challenge and as an opportunity for my artistic growth because I have never produced a full animated short.

     The contest offered many themes, I chose Philippine culture. For the animation, I wanted to show that, for me, the Philippines has a magical, playful, beautiful, and very colorful culture. I used different symbols in the video that represented these traits from the masks to the mural. I wish I could've put in more, but I had to limit the length of the animation due to time restraints.

     The reason I specifically aimed for 2D animation, was because I wanted my audience to have an appreciation for Filipino 2D animation, which isn't as shown much in today's media. 

Process:

     Producing an animated short that uses frame by frame animation can be overwhelming for a first timer, like me. The first step was pre-production. That meant storyboarding the scenes, actions and the overall pace of the video. After numerous iterations, I then moved on to the actual animation which involved the drawing and coloring of every frame and movement. I was also painting the backgrounds at the side when I wasn't animating. After finishing the animation, I did the music for the video. I casually play the piano, but I have never considered going into scoring, so it posed another challenge for me. The next and final step was compositing and editing, which involved arranging and tying all the elements together with to produce a video. And voila, that's the basic process in producing an animation, more or less.

About the Artist:

Tristan Yuvienco is a Visual Communications student in the UP College of Fine Arts and a current member of Ang INK. Other than being an avid practitioner of digital drawing, he has a great fascination for stories, music, video games, food, space and biology.

You can follow his works on Facebook or Behance.