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Animation, UK

Mentor
Sun
Student
Cheng
Tags
Animation
UK

Project Statement

Project 1: Blades of Time

Project Description

Setting

The story takes place in Beijing in 2020 — a city of advanced technology riddled with social conflict. Traditional architecture coexists with futuristic high-tech buildings, forming a distinctive "Chinese cyberpunk" metropolis. Behind the scenes, giant conglomerates manipulate politics, the economy and technology, seeking to reshape traditional culture and consolidate their power by controlling cultural media and industries.

Core Themes

  • The search for cultural heritage: The protagonist, Mark, a member of the "Blades of Time" organisation, is drawn into an adventure surrounding lost cultural relics and uncovers the city's dark secrets.
  • Technology versus society: Explores the social stratification caused by technological development and the concentration of wealth, and what individual and collective identity mean amid a cultural rupture.

Inspiration

  • Inspired by a visit to the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) museum, where reflections on lost relics sparked an in-depth exploration of the value of objects as carriers of culture.
  • Traditional Chinese architectural elements (such as upturned eaves and carved ornamentation) merge with cyberpunk aesthetics to create a cityscape that is at once distinctly Eastern and futuristic.
  • The project draws on the way futuristic Asian cities are designed in films and series such as Ghost in the Shell, using a printmaking style to heighten the visual contrast between tradition and modernity.

Design Highlights

  • Environment design: Buildings such as the "crowded brick building" and standalone apartments convey the tension of technology and tradition coexisting, while Chinese building materials reinforce the cultural symbolism.
  • Characters and world-building: CLEA, a law-enforcement agency controlled by the conglomerates, and a cast of characters from every social class reflect social control and individual struggle under a technological monopoly.

Vision

Through the protagonist's adventure, the project invites audiences to reflect on historical heritage, cultural identity and social justice amid a technological frenzy, and explores the profound question of "what makes us human" in the world of the future.

Project 1 (Blades of Time) got under way in November 2023. Walking through the ruins of the Old Summer Palace, I was pained by the relics that had been lost overseas — as carriers of culture, they are worth far more than their physical form. I imagined a cyberpunk Beijing where upturned eaves and bracket sets intertwine with holographic neon, and where the underclass of a society controlled by plutocrats fights to recover fragments of its culture. The character Mark once again became my vehicle for expressing ideas, but this time he carries not only the burden of survival but also the struggle for cultural identity.

When designing the environments, I tried to render the lines of traditional architecture with the black-and-white contrast of printmaking, only for the team to repeatedly question whether it was "too abstract". After an all-night round of revisions, it suddenly dawned on me: the colder the technology, the more it needs the warmth of culture to balance it. In the end, the "crowded brick building" — with steel for its bones and carvings for its soul — became the most powerful symbol in the story.

Project 2: AFTEREARTH

Project Description

Core Theme

The project focuses on human survival and technological innovation in a post-Earth era. Through the design of futuristic portable tech gear, it explores how sustainable development, social well-being and high technology might be brought together. The core aim is to draw up a blueprint for a post-industrial society built around ecological protection, efficient use of resources and human-centred technology.

Setting

  • Timeline: A fictional chronicle from 2035 to 2162 depicting future social problems such as resource depletion, legal conflict, technological monopoly and transnational economic expansion.
  • Social vision: Against the backdrop of a corporate-dominated global market, it emphasises how technology can serve healthy lifestyles, environmental protection and social justice.

Design Highlights

  • Portable tech gear:
    • Eco-probe: A foldable design that can be handheld or pushed into the soil, equipped with solar panels and cloud data sync, for environmental monitoring and resource management.
    • Twin-rotor drone: Fast and agile with a compact body, carrying a multi-function camera underneath for wide-angle surveying and real-time data transmission.
    • Multi-function sci-fi pistol: Built for both protection and exploration, it fires non-lethal sensor rounds and projects information onto the helmet for shooting without aiming; the design references the style of Mass Effect.
  • Future transport concepts: Lightweight, aerodynamic vehicles such as the "Olympic Pool Vehicle" are proposed to explore harmonious coexistence between cities and the natural environment.

Social Impact

  • Through tech product design, the project champions the idea of "tech for good" — for example, using the Internet of Things (IoT) to optimise industrial processes, supporting disadvantaged groups through charitable training, and creating safe, efficient working environments.
  • With a focus on women's empowerment and youth development, the design incorporates a female perspective (such as a young women's design style) and elements of social good.

Technology Integration

  • Integrates solar power, cloud computing and twin-rotor flight technology, with an emphasis on portability and adaptability to different environments.
  • Explores new modes of human–machine interaction, such as helmet projection interfaces and networks of cooperating probes, to improve the user experience and operational efficiency.

Note: Some passages are ambiguous because of OCR or layout issues; it is advisable to check the timeline logic and technical details against the original files. The project's core thread is "technological redemption in the post-Earth era", using innovative gear to reflect humanity's deeper thinking about the environment, society and the ethics of technology.

Takeaways and Reflections

A Twofold Awakening: Environment and Culture

Project 2 made me realise that environmental protection is not just a technical problem but a philosophical question about the survival of civilisation; Project 1 taught me that cultural heritage has to be actively "fought for" rather than passively preserved.

Contradiction and Reconciliation in Design

From the industrial compromises of the probe's foldable structure to the cyber-reconstruction of traditional architectural elements, I learned to find balance within contradiction — function as the bones, aesthetics as the soul.

The Timelines as Metaphor

Project 2's "belt of junk encircling the Earth" and Project 1's "plutocrats devouring culture" are, at heart, both warnings about "ignoring the future cost of the present". The two Marks' adventures are mirror images of the same question: if the environment is the body, culture is the soul, and neither can exist without the other.

Looking back now, the anxiety of late-night revisions, the clashes of team debates, even the occasional garbled machine translation in my documents (such as the line "Wave upon wave, the Yangtze River flows east" inexplicably appearing on the pistol design page, which I simply chose to read as "civilisation flows on like a river, and weapons, too, must carry history") have all left a unique imprint. Perhaps one day, when humanity truly stands at an interstellar crossroads, these early, unpolished ideas might serve as a faint light — after all, every science-fiction prophecy is merely a reflection of reality.