Renai Dance Animation by Zhike Yang and Wenjie Wu is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2024 Golden A' Design Award in Movie, Video and Animation Design Competition Category.
GoldMovie· 2024
Renai Dance Animation
Client: Boxon Media Studios
Golden A' Design Award Winner in Movie Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #161172The Design
About Renai Dance Animation
Renai Dance is a 3D animated film blending visual appeal with cultural themes and emotional depth. The story combines elements of Chinese Lion Dancing and Western Modern Ballet, showing the merging of different cultural heritages. Its soundtrack features traditional oriental music, modern symphonic elements, and thematic melodies to enhance the emotional experience. The film aims to offer a new perspective on exploring folkways, familial bonds, and the enduring vitality of culture.
The Recognition
About the Golden A' Design Award
Renai Dance Animation is a Golden A' Design Award winner, an immensely prestigious recognition granted to first-rate, marvelous, and outstanding designs. Golden winners are exceedingly innovative, visionary, and glamorously dazzling creations that reflect the prodigy, wisdom, and prowess of their designers. Renai Dance Animation is expected to be a highly praised, trendsetting, and monumental invention that delivers unprecedented value. This Golden A' Design Award-winning design is a spectacular, respected project that highly benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Renai Dance Animation creates intense feelings of desire, evokes passion, encourages creativity, and fascinates us.
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Design Interview
What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
The main inspiration behind "Renaidance" stems from my relationship with my grandfather and the rich cultural heritage he shared with me. This film is a tribute to the generational bond and the evolving nature of dreams and values. The idea is to explore how traditional values can coexist and blend with modern aspirations. It is inspired by both personal experiences and impactful films like "Frozen" and "Spirited Away," aiming to bridge the gap between past and future through a touching narrative.
What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
My main focus was to create a narrative that resonates deeply with audiences across different generations. I wanted to achieve an emotional connection by highlighting the significance of family heritage and the transition of cultural values. The film aims to provoke thought and reflection on personal growth and cultural identity, using a blend of traditional storytelling and modern animation techniques to convey its message.
What are your future plans for this award winning design?
Future plans for "Renaidance" include participating in international film festivals and collaborating with global studios for wider distribution. I also plan to create supplementary materials, such as an art book and a behind-the-scenes documentary, to share the creative process and cultural insights. Additionally, I hope to inspire educational programs that use the film to discuss cultural heritage and storytelling.
Grand Interview
Your innovative blend of Chinese Lion Dancing and Western Modern Ballet in Renai Dance Animation breaks new cultural ground - could you share the creative journey that led to this unique fusion of traditional and contemporary dance forms?
It all starts with one word: support.At the beginning, we focused on an activity that could embody the concept of support through a duo performance. The story’s core is about support—support from family and even from someone who didn’t understand you before but grows to wholeheartedly stand by you.Lion dancing represents a traditional, nostalgic activity popular across the broader Oriental region—a shared childhood memory for many. Ballet, on the other hand, represents a dream for children, with its elegant moves, fancy costumes, and pure imagination of a different culture. What’s often overlooked is that both dances require partnership. This dance takes two.
The emotional depth portrayed in Renai Dance Animation through the relationship between generations is particularly moving - what personal experiences or observations influenced your portrayal of this intergenerational narrative?
Every generation has its own vibrant life and unique timeline. They were once young, strong, and swift—just like us. These cherished memories and activities remain lively and deserve to be seen. It’s our responsibility to inherit and preserve them, bringing them into a new form.With modern techniques continuously evolving, we now have the tools to give these traditions new life while respecting their essence.
Your development of an original embroidery tool for Renai Dance Animation represents significant technical innovation - how did this custom technology enhance the traditional aesthetic elements in your animation?
Embroidery has long been a common technique for adding intricate details to fabrics. That’s why we developed a tool to streamline the creation of embroidered designs. It allows us to control thickness, metallic effects, and even silk threads, while adjusting stitch patterns easily.This tool enabled us to recreate traditional patterns from costumes we studied, without requiring artists to thread each element manually. With just a pattern, we could produce elegant silk sheets.For example, the little girl, our protagonist, wears a hanfu-inspired dress. In real life, such garments would feature layers of handmade embroidery—gold and silk threads creating shimmering effects under sunlight as the dancer moves. We applied the same approach to the ballet dress and shoes, ensuring the traditional aesthetic of Oriental art was sustained and integrated beautifully into the design.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- “RenaiDance” is a 3D narrative emotional animation. The theme invigorates cultural inheritance and the integration of dreams, courage, and culture as transformation. By artistically interpreting a motif of inheritance and family support, integrating different cultures“inheritance” through the inspiring story, this film braces strong family love and elder culture in a never-ending chain.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- This film's standard resolution is 1920 pixels x 1080 pixels (Full HD). Its duration is 3 minutes and 47 seconds, with a frame rate of 23.9fps.
- Tags
- Animation, Love, Family, Culture inherit, Short film, Generation, Oriental, Kids,
- Production Technology
- For the pre-production stage, we utilized Adobe Photoshop and Storyboard Pro to create our concept art and storyboard, establishing the foundation for our film's narrative and visual direction. Moving into the production phase, we used Python to align with MAYA's coding language: MEL, and built our own pipeline tool to efficiently organize files. Then we adopted a Maya-centric workflow, where we applied Maya for modeling, rigging, layout, and animation.
Substance Painter and Substance Designer for texturing and refining the style of half-PBR materials. We tried Marvelous Designer to make clothes for our characters, it created organic draped folds and complex pleated folds on dresses, which would take triple the time in traditional modeling process.
Houdini gave us chances to explore visual effects that resonated with the scene's emotions.
Subsequently, based on our research result and testing shots rendering, we leveraged Redshift Render Farm to generate high-quality renders with faster render speed compared to the Arnold rendering. After exporting multi-layered EXR image sequences from Maya, we brought all the CG render to Nuke and refined the final details with compositing techniques.
In the post-production phase, we integrated After Effects and Premiere to edit the film, as well as compose the musical score and synchronize sound effects with the visuals.
We created an originally developed embroidery tool to easily trans any input pattern to traditional hand-made embroidery assets in digital. Artists can customize the direction of embroidery, the range of stitch types, the density and orientation of the stitching, as well as the different materials used for threads in embroidery, like silk, linen, gold, etc.
The traditional patterns on every fabric surface in the film, like on the dress, vest, and lion mask, all applied this technique. Our title logo and every word were re-designed. The design process began with initial sketches on paper, followed by digitization and refinement using Adobe Illustrator, then sending to Substance Designer, went through our embroidery tools to gain handmade thread details, gave the film unique texture. - Design Challenge
- It is a huge challenge the integrate productions with all of the talents through the global world. The unique original soundtrack was presented in harmony by Hollywood composer Zak McNeil, Asian Traditional Orchestra, and Russian professional sound designer Denis Nechipurenko. Mixing well with Western Ballet style and modern electric sound effects to balance the different cultures between Asian and Western, Tradition with Modern. With vivid voice-overs perform the characters by stacking emotions, we create an emotional atmosphere at every affecting moment.
Our honor is to work with talented assistant directors, co-artists, technical assistants, composers, sound designers, and voice-over actors. We got through it together, challengingly under the budget and time limit finally during the difficult time. - Research
- One of the most significant challenges encountered pertains to striking a balance between effectively conveying intense emotions to the audience while adhering to stringent temporal and financial constraints. Initially, our narrative blueprint envisioned an elaborate dance sequence to illustrate the protagonist's growth journey. However, subsequent research and production trials revealed that the intricate details such as the lion mask's fur and the character's real hair, coupled with the dimly lit environment, would necessitate twice the anticipated rendering time.
Consequently, a crucial decision was reached to determine the equilibrium point between technical feasibility and artistic integrity. We opted to maintain the core story structure and instead allocate resources towards refining lighting and meticulously color-correcting keyframes to engage the audience. This strategic shift involved utilizing a series of carefully composed still frames to denote the passage of time, thus replacing the originally planned full dance sequence.
In doing so, we aimed to ensure that viewers would embark on a complete emotional odyssey alongside our character, encapsulated by a cohesive soundscape and indelible visual imagery. Additionally, this approach leaves room for imaginative interpretation, potentially laying the groundwork for future sequels. - Inspiration
- This film is dedicated to our grandfathers' generation. Beautiful traditional cultures experience significant impacts from new influences. The gap between generations is widening over time. Does the emergence of a new symbol necessarily lead to the fading of old cultures? Is the pursuit of dreams inherently divergent from our loved ones? We want to explore this point to see if we can find a vision that resonates with both our hearts and the future. The love of elevating the next generation's dreams would be the most supportive heritage and legacy.
- Project Duration
- In 2019, the film project began in New York, completing its production in 2021. It was screened at events in several international locations, like New York, Aspen, Beloit, Nepal, Taiwan, etc.
- Operation Flow
- This film is suitable for all ages, and is kid-friendly. To get the best viewing experience, we recommend watching it in a dark room to enjoy the truest colors and most intense visuals. Also, using headphones or playing it in a place with stereo sound is a good idea because the movie has professionally mixed left and right channel audio effects, plus an original score you'll likely remember long after. There's a hidden Easter egg graphic after the end credits which provides a sneak peek into the possible future storyline extension, so don't forget to stay tuned for that extra treat.
- Team Members
- Zhike Yang
Wenjie Wu
Han Chen Chang - Image Credits
- Video Credits: Creative Director Zhike Yang.
Video Credits: Technical Director Wenjie Wu.
Video Credits: Creative Producer Han Chen Chang.
Video Credits: Sound Track Zak McNeil.
Video Credits: Sound Design Denis Nechipurenko.
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