sound treatment

The sound materials used in my project come from sources from the school library and internet under the creative commons liscence. The main melody I picked is called "Wounded", composed and performed by Kevin MacLeod from http://incompetech.com/. The composer welcomes other people to use his work and only asks attribution in return.

The melody for the individuation process is inspired from a tune in my dream. It is then composed in FL studio. I hope to refine it by involving sound designers' cooperation.

visual treatment

All the characters and environments will be created in the 3D animation software Maya.  The composition will be finished in After Effect.

The visual style can be divided into four types

1. The stage perfomance at the beginning and end. Custume design and choreography for the dancers will be in Boraque style.
2. The living room interior scene. character will take off her costume and be in shorts and dress cage.
3. The underwater scence. her dress cage will break off and the water effect will be composed in after effect with a blurred background from photos
4.The flying scene. Complete nothingness, simple geomotric form built in glass material

Description

If “All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players”(Shakespeare),  an incident that messes up a performance could be a malfunctioning mask that keeps crying and producing fish in front of the audience. Following a fish from her troublesome mask, Ophelia escapes to a room below the stage. The room is decorated with photos of Ophelia when she was a kid, but their faces are all either drawn on or taped with pictures of masks. Walking down a flight of stairs to the living room, she takes off her restrictive costume that she feels incompetent to bear.

After arriving at the bottom of living room, Ophelia lies on a sofa. Meanwhile, she gets swallowed by water that’s streaming out constantly from the spot where her foot touches the carpet. The living room is flooded and Ophelia floats lifeless. Fish swim out from the furniture drawers, and the floor of the living room disppears into bottomless ocean. An octupus tentacle grabs onto her skirt cage and pulls her down the water. As she falls deeper and deeper into the ocean, her masks start to break and fall off one by one and get eaten by an angler fish. Suddenly alert at her situation, Ophelia grabs a broken piece from her mask and attacks the tentacle that is pulling her down. However, the tentacle breaks her skirt cage and she can swim freely.

She turns back to look into the depth of the ocean, she seas the body of the tentacles is buried into the sand under a gravestone bearing her name.  Comprehensively, she swims towards the gravestone and starts to dig into the sand. She pulls out giant nautilus with a illuminent shell. 

The pneumatic nautilus hovers in mid-air and  Ophelia sees the reflection of herself which slowly reveals to be a boy with the same face but with wings on his head. The boy becomes a quicksiver snake that slithers on the nautilus and breaks into it at the top middle of the shell. The shell explodes and emits dazzling light.

When it dims the world become structured as a globe inside a pyramid with a cylinder tunnel in the middle.  Ophelia stands at the bottom of the cylinder tunnal, and a mask made with the nautilus shell and the caduceus of Hermes' appears infront of her. She holds on to the caduceus and it takes her up.

In the mid-air she sees the stage and her fellow dancers. She lands on the stage and finishes the dance. The curtain closes.

Synopsis

 Ophelia, by Christine Xue Lan. Falling into the depth of her unconscious world, Ophelia lets go of control over consciousness and reaches a mature stage of animus.  

Summary

The project is to make a three minute animated short called Ophelia. It is a surrealistic adaption of Carl Gustav Jung’s psychological theories on the process of individuation.