晓梦•蝴蝶 | Between Wings & Fire is a cross-cultural window on the classic Chinese tragedy —— 梁祝 | The Butterfly Lovers, which has inspired many generations of adaptions across different forms of media. Our bilingual remix draws on Chinese female poet 李清照 (Li Qingzhao), pop-rock musicals and Disney movies from Six to Mulan. And my role includes both acting and graphic designing.
First, I made an intro animation for it,
telling the original story
In the design of the animation storyboard, I broke the traditional narrative (telling story from both the perspective of two lovers), took the heroine Zhu Yingtai as the complete narrative center, and made all the stories revolve around her.
So, I always put her in the center of the picture.
I never drew her parents in this animation, although they exsist as important resistance and motivation in the story. On the contrary, I used her environment rather than the people around her to indicate her life of being controlled and losing her freedom, a closed room, a tiny gazebo, a bird cage...
As for the use of color, my design concept is to use only black lines and white canvas to reflect the artistic conception of traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting.
At the same time, red will also join in time to play a different emphasis role in different contexts: the transformation of identity, different dreams...
There're only two "real faces" in my animation, any other person appeared in this story rather than Zhu Yingtai and Liang Shanbo only got "blank faces". Only the characters has a soul to be their real selves have a "real face"...
As the story reaches its climax, more red is added to the picture.
Red is always considered as a color with positive connotations, but in this story, the traditional red wedding is more like a funeral: on the red invitation is two people who are not in love, the red heart is broken, and the white envelope is covered with red blood or tears...
Yingtai's wedding is really sad to me, although red represents happiness in traditional Chinese context, when I was painting her dress, jewelry, room, mirror into red, I drew her red tears, or, blood tears... But it is not allowed, someone else will erase that for her.
From her own bedroom to the bridal sedan chair, Yingtai's sad face is covered by a red hood, which all the bride must wear in ancient China. She lost all her soul, so just sit there, letting anyone take her to the wedding place...
Finally, instead of letting Yingtai jump directly into the grave, I used the three joy sticks she placed on the grave to transform herself into the smoke as her avatar, and then, let the smoke float into the tomb shaped like a butterfly. After the tomb is closed, everything is restored, and the butterflies are flying in the air with the trace of the symbol of "infinity"...
Here's the animation:
Then, I draw storyboards of scenes that
we designed but cannot realized on satge
Scene 1: The Grave Wedding
SCENE 2: Li Qingzhao & Butterfly
SCENE 3: Three Women
END SCENE: The Butterfly Dance
FINAL SCENE: Wake Up
Finally, here's the final poster I designed:
And, here's our show:
