Sunday 27 March 2011

I Met the Walrus



I love this film. There's very little animation really, and the sound is entirely taken from one old interview recording, so in a lot of ways this would have been quite easy to make. The ideas are big though, and animation and illustration is perfect because it can morph quickly from one image to the next, and cover huge themes and abstract ideas really quickly and effectively. And I love the contrast between John Lennon's rambling ideas about peace and violence and the way the world works, and then his mundane conversation about the whereabouts of a key and his white suit from the night before....

Tuesday 22 March 2011

Beginning to think about character design...

My character for the Agents and Behaviour's brief is going to be a badger. A honey badger to be precise. I want to make a really short claymation set to the sound-track of the popular YouTube video 'The Crazy Nasty-Ass Honey-Badger', but in which the badger is far from crazy or bad-ass. The final character is going to be a fat, lazy, couch potato who'd rather order takeaway pizza than bother chasing after animals like the badgers on YouTube. I've been drawing a lot of badgers, some cartoon and some realistic. This fellow is not at all what I'm envisaging, I've just been trying to teach myself how to draw badgers before moving on to a more exaggerated style, and then beginning the actual process of clay modelling.

Sunday 20 March 2011

200 Drawings

Storytelling Presentation


This week I have to do the first of the case study presentations for our Storytelling class. I have to speak for 12 minutes about the use of character in a previous student's work. From the 2010 AIM dvd I chose a film called 'Among the Clouds' by Jinchao Han, about a small lonely boy drifting though the sky on a decrepit wooden ship. I found it really hard to find any works from last years class which had a really developed use of character, and in a way it was this lack that has proven to me just how important what we're learning in Kate's class really is. I was originally supposed to be discussing the use of dialogue in one of last year's works, but not a single film on the DVD actually contained any dialogue. It seems its true that people shy away from dialogue, and that the short film format means most people barely bother to develop any interesting characters- its hard enough to get a simple plot across in such a short amount of time. I'm beginning to understand how much richness and depth you can add to a short piece just by thinking really long and hard about the development of character. I chose Han's film because of the effort he has clearly gone to to invest his character with personality and emotion- from its expressive movements to the ways in which the landscape and weather of the film mirror the character's emotions.

Friday 18 March 2011

Life's a Beach....

I've been trying to work on a video clip for Montero's new song 'Mumbai (Life's a Beach'), using collaged magazine cutouts on my stop-motion set-up at home. Above is a segment from the beginning of the clip. Its a little story about a sad, cold, lonely eskimo who dreams of a better life in Mumbai, and sails there on an iceberg only to have it melt and sink into the ocean just as Mumbai comes into view. I'm struggling at the moment with the character design for the eskimo; I made a collage prototype but I think its way too big. I need enough room to work on a range of facial expressions but I will have to make a smaller figure for long distance shots.




Thursday 17 March 2011

200 Drawings



Here is my video for the 200 drawings assignment. I used photos for reference to make a 360 degree view of Mark's rotating head, and then drew frame by frame to make his beard take over and wrap around his entire head. I would have liked to have had more time to develop the sound, and in future I think I will try to put each drawing under a sheet of glass to prevent the different angles of the paper making such a flickering effect with the light.