Siyu Liu: Motion Designer-2024

What is the sea?

-PSA/Dynamic Typography/Collage/After Effects

Created by Siyu Liu            Voiceover by Artsonics from Fiverr (https://www.fiverr.com/aminebentaher?source=inbox)

Concept

This is a Public Service Announcement for Ocean Conservancy to draw attention to problems happening with the ocean and invite the audience to participate in the programs of Ocean Conservancy through a conversation between a child and grandma in a hypothetical future scenario where the ocean doesn't exist anymore.

Brief Introduction

Ocean Conservancy is an organization that works across the world to ensure a healthy ocean and protect the wildlife and communities that depend on it. "Because the ocean impacts each one of us—the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat—the ocean is the responsibility of us all."

I love nature and always hope to be able to do my part in protecting the environment so I chose to do a PSA for Ocean Conservancy.

Design

Style

I created a feeling of the past by making it an old diary decorated with pieces of old paper, tapes, and stitches between the pages because it's based on a hypothetical future scenario reminiscing about the past. To create a feeling of the dialogue and distinguish the "past"(with the sea, beautiful) and the "current"(without the sea, hopeless), I made every sentence by the child in a darker and more desaturated background and the sentences by grandma when recalling the past in a brighter and ancient style background.

Assets

To echo the context, I want to make the concept of the sea surreal but still recognizable, so I used both micro and macro objects like cells and campus and tried not to point out sea creatures directly. For sea creatures, I only used close-up images of a part of their bodies, some of which I used as notes and stickers in the diary while the others I made as textures. For some of the corals, I broke the images and reformed them to make the feeling of slowly piecing together memories.

Sound

The major part of the sound is the vocal of Grandma who has a warm peaceful voice easily bringing people to that beautiful memory. For the child's part, instead of letting a child read directly, I chose to let it be replaced by a variety of bell sounds to indicate the clear voice of the young, meanwhile making it an alert for the audience in a softer way so as not to create a huge gap between the soft voice of grandma.

Cheers to Youth

-Motion Poster/Cinema4D/After Effects

Created by Siyu Liu   Song by SEVENTEEN (Writer and Composer: Woozi, Bumzu)

Concept

This is a motion poster for the song Cheers to Youth by SEVENTEEN, a K-pop group. By showing a paper plane flying through beautiful scenes, the motion poster shows the comfort and joy of that matches with the song.

Mood Board

Brainstorm

Postproduction

I did all the lighting that I can do in C4D but the color is still not that ideal so I did color correction in After Effects. And I also added typography to match the poster element in AE. To create a glowing effect, I copied and pasted the same layer, used Gaussian Blur, and blended in Luminosity mode.

What Do You Smell?

-Promo Animation/Procreate/After Effect

Designer and Voiceover: Siyu Liu

Concept

This is a promo animation for The 10th International Aromatic Industry Exhibition(Shanghai), which aims at connecting fragrance with memory and giving the audience a pleasant visual experience corresponding to smelling fragrances. Corresponding to that, fragrance can show one's personality and life experience, where people can find comfort.

Brief Introduction

Aromatic exhibition has always focused on aromatic plant planting, extraction equipment and technology, essential oil pure dew application and cultural inheritance and innovation and other aromatic industry ecological chain display subjects, has grown into such an influential display and exchange platform in China, known as the "aroma industry vane".

Brainstorm

In this project, I mainly want to convey the pleasant feeling that aromatic products bring to people while blending in another layer of flowers on the top to imply the industry. And I want the overall tone to be bright and soft with yellow and pink being the dominant hue.

Mood Board

Script

Storyboard

Original Style Frames

Process

Style Frame Projects

Created by Siyu Liu

Pipa

-Chinese Traditional Instrument/ Deconstruction/Adobe Illustrator

Introduction

Pipa is a traditional Chinese musical instrument that can create clear sounds like beads dropping on plates and play powerful songs. Though I haven't learned Pipa before, I really enjoyed the performances. The sound of Pipa contains our culture and history.

According to the research I've done, Pipa has different appearances over time. Before the Tang dynasty, the word 'Pipa' referred to all the plucked stringed instruments. Ancient Pipa is round while modern Pipa is pear-shaped. This project mainly uses the latter because I regard pear shape as special in all instruments.

Concept

By combining the Pipa with traditional Chinese paintings and Chinese landscapes, I hope to convey the beauty of Chinese culture and visualize the feature of the unique sound of the Pipa.

Design

There is a famous painting called Playing Pipa Behind the Back(反弹琵琶) which is related to Dunhuang grotto murals(敦煌石窟壁画) so I added cracked-wall texture to make my frames more historical. During the process of drafting, I found string, sound waves and Pipa structures could be related to rivers and mountains, which reminded me of another painting called Thousands Miles of Rivers and Mountains(千里江山图). So, the color palette came from these two paintings. After all, China has a long history, rich culture, and spectacular natural scenery, and I’m really proud of them!

Process

It Is a Secret

- tactile/wool felting/poetry

Concept

It is a poem-based tactile project to show the beauty and sweetness of secret love and the colorful dream when people dream of their crush. 

Brainstorm

Design

To reveal the blurred and unsure dream, I decided to use wool felting which can bring a hazy effect. Since some parts of the dream can be remembered, there must be things that are not hazy, so I used pearls, stitches, and fabrics. For the 'secret' part of the concept, I decided to let the 9 frames form the shape of one person gingerly trying to touch another one, but it can never be that obvious. During the process, I found that with the wool getting thicker, the sunlight was more blocked. So I try to use the sunlight to show the 'secret' in the concept, which is hiding behind the sunlight. The one being reached is used by shipping boxes in my home, which block the sunlight in a different way from the wool so that the two people do not look like they are in the same world to show the distance of unrequited love.

Process

The end but not the end!

Thank you for scrolling all the way down here and hope you enjoyed my projects so far. I will explore more on motion media design and improve myself. Please feel free to give me feedback!

Have a good day!:)