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I see my gif as a reflection of my recent lives. After the lectures moved online, I do not know why there are more daily pressure and workload. I was overwhelmed. All the elements that appeared in my gif are taken from my everyday life. I want to use this gif as a reference for my numbingly programmed lifestyle. Ironically, the only thing I could think of inspiration is my recent life. This kind of lifestyle is killing people's ingenuity. Writing or any form of creativity should be fulfilling, but at this point, it becomes a kind of discipline, a routine that brings pressure. For most of my frames, I used extreme close shots to show my emotionless in busy days. The eyes are supposed to be the window of the mind. They usually reveal people’s unconscious reactions and mood swings. But in busy working days, they are just an organ that connects my visual sense to the brain and import information. Coffee, for me, is like a medicine to keep me awake and alive. My body is mechanized by daily pressure, and the coffee is one of my means of production.

I drew all my frames, and I feel like I am using the onion cell technique to draw my gif like I am doing an animation. The most challenging thing for me is the transition between each frame. After importing all the drawings to photoshop, some subjects could not match each other in other frames. When I was drawing, I always forgot to consider how much I should move to make the images look coherent. I have to go back and force to repaint or reposition it in photoshop again. And for some elements, I want it to pop up in the gif, but when the gif starts looping, it disappears too quickly. I have to draw more frames to extend its time. Since this gif is only about my reflection on my life, I also used myself as my drawing model.

This video is using the elevator as the door to experience human desire. I interpret Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The person entered the elevator from the first floor, which represents the basic need that has been satisfied: the water, air, etc. The second floor represents security needs. I reframe it within the internet era. The surveillance camera shares a sense of complicated feelings. It protects people's safety in a way, meanwhile ruining the feeling of security by invaliding people's personal space. The third floor is for the belonging needs. The crowd of people and rotating airplane represent the mobility and the lack of intimate relationships in society. Hopefully, the shoots will give people a sense of overwhelm and detachment. The fourth floor is for esteem needs. The cat is a fortune cat regarded as a mascot for wealth in Chinese and Japanese culture. I want the audience to think about the meaning of money, it is just a representation or a reflection of your ambition and desire. Think about do we need that? And the last floor represents the self-fulfillment needs. I think this floor is for self-reflection, asking the Who am I and who do I want to be.

When I saw the description of this assignment, the first thing that came up to my mind is the door to human desire. And I think the elevator works well in terms of representing the levels. I planed the themes on the storyboard first, but when actually making the video, I deleted some close-up shots to give audience a more first-person view experience. I played with AE, PR and Procreate a lot in this assignment. It's my first time to use AE to build animation models. It cost me a lot of time and when I open the apps together, sometimes they crushed my computer. But I think the result turns out well.