Exploring fake news, Mengjie tells cautionary tales of covid and misinformation's entangled spread using allegory and animation.
Major project
News and Honey
Storyboard Page 1
Storyboards are an important part of storytelling processes, being used in animation, live-action filmmaking, advertising and even user experience mapping. Its purpose is to turn narratives into visual information cost-effectively before the animation process in order to quickly establish and test a story. Though the storyboard was drawn on paper, Mengjie's animation process ventured into digital media with the use of Procreate drawings animated in Adobe's After Effects.
Storyboard Page 2
Storyboard Pages 1 & 2 display the plot of News & Honey. The research behind the story was the result of investigating the boom of information exchanges on social media whereby satire, superstitions and deliberately incorrect information combined in a space where content is decentralised and unregulated. Along with poverty and cultural distrusts of government, misinformation furthered Covid's spread contributing to its overarching devastating effects.
Browsing (Animatic)
A key element of this project was making sure the unusual metaphor of bees' pollination was relatable to the audience's understanding of Covid. As a result, Mengjie experimented with combining the digital world with the organic processes of bees to more closely relate the unconscious spread of misinformation through social media sites with bees' spread of a toxic pollen. The GIF shows the short's protagonists logging onto a website where they control bee avatars in pollen related games.
Wonder (Animatic)
One of the difficulties Mengjie had to negotiate was the creation of anthropomorphic bees that carried an air of comicality. Using cartoonish expressions and idioms borrowed from animé, the budding animator succeeded in imbuing non-human characters with appealing personalities. The GIF above is a moment from Mengjie's animatic: a storyboard that takes time into consideration, albeit, without fully being animated.
News & Honey's Opening
The animation opens with two brothers immersed in digital technology and unaware of the potential dangers that await them there. The scene itself has been composed to ensure the audience too remains unaware of such a threat, with colour coding the characters with their immediate environment using a bright palette to show a harmony.
News & Honey's Closing
The animation's close is jarring, taking a drastic turn that tries to place an emphasis of how digital dangers, when at their most extreme, can offer grievous outcomes in the world beyond the internet. The limited animation below is a work-in-progress, testing whether the story, design and motion are working together coherently before sound design is explored.
Mengjie Zhou
Major project
News and Honey