Kung Fu Panda and Emotions
Exploration of human emotions through the eyes of Po, the panda in Kungfu Panda.
After viewing the movie Kung Fu Panda, Wenjing, Nicole, and I were immediately drawn to the protagonist of the movie, Po’s rich and dramatic facial expression. As you might know, Po is not a conventional panda, he is a Kung Fu master. However, being someone who has a big belly and short limbs doesn’t become a Kung Fu master that easily. In the movie, Po went through several stages of finding himself and finally becomes a master. His facial expression were were tightly connected with his inner emotions at different stages along the way, and we found that these emotions are very complicated. They are often composed with many different subtle emotions. From self doubting, excited, reluctant, unconfident, happy, anxious, angry, to confident, and self assuring, Po’s dramatic expressions acted as a magnifier for viewers to take a closer look at his emotions, and understand his inner state of mind throughout the movie. Therefore, we want to start with Po’s facial expression to explore and understanding our human emotions, ways of finding who are from an emotion point of view, and ways to cope with our exsiting emotions.
Coco: At the first stage of our project, we took screenshot of every single facial expression that Po makes throughout the movie. Then we turned all the images to black and white to better analyze the expressions. During the process, we found that with solely the eyes, we can already read a lot of information about Po’s emotion. So we isolated his eyes out, and took a closer look at them. I was really interested in the shapes of his eye, but I wanted to make these shapes somehow connected to not just Po’s emotions, but my emotion, and probably our human emotions. In able to do so, I filled the eyes to make them not look like eyes any more. They I took a step further, and made them geomatric.
However, the experiment of the geometric shapes did not convey emotions in the way that I wanted. So I started another round of experimentation: I tried to combine geometric shapes and organic shapes and put them into a 10 page story. In this story, I depicted the emotion in me throughout the day. Things happen during the day, and they trigger little emotions in me, and as the day goes, the emotions grow and combine. At night, they all deposit and come together.
After I listened to Wenjing’s description of meditation, I felt that my design mimics the process of meditation more. Thus, I reduced the pages to 5, and made the visual more consistent. Having each color representing one emotion and making them settle in the end, I turned the story into the process of meditation. The circles around each blob are mantra that I sing when doing the meditation. The front sides represent the current state of my emotions, and the back side are words representing the situation that I want to achieve at the moment. In this meditating process, I recognize my emotions, cope with these emotions, and calm them down to achieve a inner peace, and to ensure my existence.
Nicole: After we got Po’s eyes, we were actually a bit lost about where to go. We were stuck with the idea of eyes and facial expressions, until we had a long discussion and finally decided on the direction of emotions. Each of us tried several ways of expressing emotions through lines, shapes and colors. It was really interesting to see how different people would come with so different interpretations of emotions. Wenjing only used black and white and created more exaggerated feelings, while Coco’s patterns were much more peaceful. I separated Po’s eyes into single shapes and rotated them to create a number of flowers, which stood for different emotions.
While each of us had created our own ways of expressing emotions, here came another problem: how to put everything together and form a consistent system. We thought about several themes, like telling a story of finding one’s identity, or the contrast between facial expression and real emotions. Finally, inspired by James, we decided to make the project into a decoding system that deciphers emotions, and each of us would have a different decoding guide.
I gave each eye an emotion and put the flowers from eyes together to compose patterns.
By decreasing the line weight and layering different patterns on top of each other, I created a much more complicated and blooming pattern which actually surprised myself how these black eyes could morph into something completely different. I also gave each pattern a more complex emotion on the back of the postcard, under which was a recipe of how this emotion was composed of little flowers as gradients. This would be my decoding system.
Wenjing: For my part, I emphasized about the negative emotions which are the primary emotion comes to my mind. and, the complex emotion expression remind me a course of therapy, in which teaches me how to divide the different emotions happened at one moment. Since we decided to use eyes to find out Po’s emotions, I have the idea to use eyes to decode emotions. In the back of postcard, I used the different patterns to represent the different emotions. In the front of the postcard, I put eyes which represent the different. I want the audience to play with the their emotion reaction with the word I have.
