White Snake: Afloat

Regarding the three industrial chains of “new legend”, “new myth” and “new culture” , the  creative purport  of Light Chaser animation can be described as “digital classicism”. Pre-modern Chinese characters became the prerequisite for different Chinese-speaking regions to cross dialects and accents, and this common writing system summoned similar cultural memories of the global Chinese-speaking era. When digital media began to retell classical Chinese stories, “Chinese classicism” met with “digital technology.” She particularly stressed the importance of “memory” : here “memory” refers to both the long-lost cultural memory and the memory storage function in the digital virtual space. Combining the digital technology with the classical may provide us with a whole new perspective on Chinese characteristic. Specifically in the contemporary spreading process of the Legend of the White Snake, the public’s cultural memory is actually shaped by the media, which is a layered effect of cultural memory. The animated film White Snake: Afloat consciously makes use of this effect by audio-visual means to fully mobilize the public’s memory of different media for the TV series “The Legend of the White Snake”, the novel and the movie “Green Snake”, producing a layered emotional effect.

Of course, the “memory” in the digital space can only be effectively benefited if it is continuously transformed from virtual to physical, so the local transformation of digital classicism should be an important issue. There is no doubt that “Chang ‘An” released in the summer of 2023 has pushed the artistic creation of light-following animation to a new height, and one of its most successful strategies is to narrate the geographical space “Chang ‘An” as the emotional memory center of the film, thus creating an aesthetic realm of “poetic geography”. In this way, the urban landscape custom in digital animation has become an important representation of the local cultural tourism industry. “White Snake: Afloat” obviously absorbed this industry experience, and deeply bound the White snake story to the urban geography of Hangzhou: West Lake, Black Pearl Lane, Fengle Lou, Nine Creeks and Eighteen Gullies, Shapi Lane, Chaomen Tile… Although various classical landscapes have been fully displayed in the sense of space, they also have their inherent timeliness. The film attaches great importance to traditional Chinese solar terms. The whole story begins with the Lantern Festival, goes through cold food, Dragon Boat Festival, Double Ninth Festival, and finally returns to the Lantern Festival, completing the narrative circle. Different solar terms also produce different local customs, eating youth groups, dragon boat racing, tide watching and other seasonal folk ceremonies are blended with the local scenery of Hangzhou, and together build a civilized sense of “time and space”, just like the song at the end of the Yue opera opera: “A cup a thousand miles away, recalling the willows of the same lake together.”

This seems to confirm the materialization trend of digital classicism: the white snake floats and eventually becomes the reflection of the West Lake in the memory of the people, but the willows on the lake are still swaying in the wind. From cultural memory to local scenery, the public’s perception of time can be spatialized into some kind of material carrier, which is a concept of time and space rooted in traditional Chinese culture.

The expression of the character in “White Snake: Afloat” will be more delicate, and the first breakthrough in technology, such as the facial interaction is squeezed, his structure or shape should be convenient for the animator to operate, so there is a very high coordination system for binding and model coordination, and finally the animator can produce this animation. The difficulty of doing this is relatively high, there are many controllers, too many controller bindings will be very heavy, to an animation role light, but also to achieve the effect. In the technology of expression, it is driven by demand, and it is mainly based on the performance of the story.
Fluid special effects can be more and more real, the most difficult is the interaction between special effects and role performance, there must be some changes in special effects according to the change of the role, and this change needs to have some animation, so its shape or structure needs to be more reasonable, but also have artistic effects. So in this regard, not only the real special effects can be solved, but also a lot of artistic judgment can be solved. Technically, there are many things to try, and different departments have to collaborate and integrate different artistic points to achieve this interaction.