“Your life is just someone else's entertainment”
Kenka is a cel-shading martial arts short animation, with a focus on the 2d manga art style. Telling a story of a female thief that steals an artefact in a temple, but is prevented by a guardian which led to fierce fighting. This conflict causes the world around them to collapse, revealing to them they are characters within a manga.
This short film also aims to answer my research question “How do I use manga elements and camera movement to simplify a complex fight sequence, with themes of character self-awareness and breaking the fourth wall within the narrative technique?"
This project was created by Malachi Mckay and me (Jingxi Yang).
The short film aims to combine the cinematic form and art style of manga to showcase a 2.5D comic book world, bringing the audience a fresh experience of ‘watching’ a manga. My interests are in creating the texture of hatching and screentone, for a martial arts sequence (animation). Due to our animation being mainly fighting actions, it is difficult to contact a martial artist to record their moves by motion capture, so my teammate and I agree to animate manually. There are two types of animation in the short film, actions in combat are 3D animation; manga elements (such as speed lines, smears and onomatopoeia) are made in 2D.
The inspiration for this film comes from the film Spiderman: Into The Spider-verse, and a short video. That video is about a sketch drawn in a 3D space in Blender, which also introduces me to this software. Over the course of this project, I had the opportunity to study the node system in Blender to achieve a 2d look, such as the speed line, the stylised sky, the ink effect and the hatching tone.
