Point Of View project
Initial thoughts about what to explore:
The last film I did for my foundation last year was about violence against women, revolving around the Jorōgumo myth- the tale of a man-eating spider. In summary, the story followed a controlling man becoming obsessive over his weak and beaten-down wife until he believes she is a monster, eventually killing her. The audience sees the wife, dead, as the human she is at the end, not the monstrous form they’ve been seeing her in. Music was an incredibly important part of this project for me, too, and I spent a good deal of time trying to find the perfect copyright free song, which I believed was very successful in the end product. Even though I enjoyed this, it was an extremely draining and heavy process. My creative voice (a key part of this next project) did come across, and it felt deeply authentic and personal to me, but I want to explore happier things. Quiet, fulfilling happiness rather than big problems or huge bouts of excitement. Simple and nice underrated moments in our lives that bring us joy.
Some topics I could explore are friendship, laughter, pets, food, precious items, favourite films and books, and love. Method-wise, I think messy and homely objects could help me get across the atmosphere I want to create. One problem I faced last year was not having an image of the final film in my head for a long time, so this year I’m going to experiment with aesthetics and methods of animation quite early. I think a piece of mixed media could be really nice with this, especially leaning towards stop motion. I think special items from the home would work very well for a film about personal joys.
Further ideas:
Positive things I could explore:
- healing
- love of friends/family
- love of small things like objects or small moments
Negative things I could explore:
- disassociation
- horror
- monsters like werewolves, vampires, etc
There is an episode of Adventure Time titled ‘All The Little People’ that I watched years ago that sticks with me to this day. It revolves around themes of obsession and manipulation, but to me, could also be about disassociation. Similarly, the animation ‘Bomb’ by Peter Millard. The caption of this animation is:
A container filled with explosive or incendiary material, designed to explode on impact or when detonated by a timing, proximity, or remote-control device. I want some breakfast and get on with my day.
This animation seems to be about human thoughts; there’s a phenomenon that, as far as we know, only humans experience. Thoughts about our own deaths, about the universe, life, etc. To me, it has another layer of meaning. Again it relates to disassociation to me, a feeling of not being able to cope with this unnamed feeling and sense of unease that you can’t fix or fight against.
I think it could be really cool to do an animation that revolves around a person playing with dolls, especially if its abstract and emotive. I’m not sure how to put it into words, but I’ll create some sketches to get the mood I’m going for. In my past experience, I think it’s always best to narrow down the aesthetic before moving forward, at least for my method of working. I’d also like to do something with stop motion or working with dolls/puppets or clay.
Final idea:
It has suddenly dawned on me that I need to scale back my ideas as I only have a week to do this as well as the work for my rotation (which is location drawing). Therefore, I’ve decided to just go ahead and draw whats in my brain right now: a collection of rabbits eating meat with a royalty free song I’ve chosen along with a voice over of some of my words, which could include:
- “What am I eating?”
- What am I doing?”
- “Who am I?”
- “When did I get here?”
- “Who are you?”
- “Stay back”
- “Come here”
- “Do you see him?”
- “Do you see me?”
- “Am I real?”
- “Is this real?”
- “It’s been years”
I thought the title could be “BLACKOUT”. This is personal to me, as this project should be, as I suffered from disassociation and still do occasionally. I won’t go into it here but I hope I can capture my feelings through my art.
During this phase, the creative writing rotation was instrumental in helping me create my idea. I was able to put the skills I learnt, namely cutting out the ‘fat’ of an idea to get to the key brilliant parts of it, into action. In addition, the viewfinding task from previous Intro To Animation classes allowed me to zero in and focus on exactly what I want to do and what ideas to take forward.
The song I’ve chosen is ‘on questions of responsibility’ by Lloyd Rodgers from Pixabay.com
I edited a version in audacity for my piece:
Palette designs
Jumping off from the rabbit idea, I decided to experiment with some colour palettes, character designs, backgrounds, aesthetics, etc.
Here is the final palette I landed on. I feel it creates a dark, spooky atmosphere while not being cliche. The pink in particular is my favourite since it stands out so much, and compliments the teal nicely. Some other palettes I considered are below.
My favourite of these palettes is the monochrome blue one, but I felt I needed something darker and so chose the blue pink and red one.
Character designs
After this, I did some character designs. I found the humans very difficult to do since I have more experience drawing animals, but I’m happy with the final one I came up with. It’s simple, so all the atmosphere is created with the colour, which is a very important part of this project.
Next, I moved onto the hare/rabbit designs, beginning with drawing a fairly realistic hare as a jumping off point. After, I experimented with some shape language and more cartoon-y looks.
After doing these, I decided to go with simple, semi-realistic designs and let the colours do all the talking.
The character design rotation was incredibly useful for this project. Because of it, I was able to experiment and push designs, using shapes to see what would and wouldn’t work, before landing on the semi realistic ones I chose.
Once I’d finished the designs, I went ahead and animated, letting my brain take me where ever. I didn’t do any animatics and instead stuck with the loose ideas I had floating around my head. This approach worked marvelously, since it was intended to be an abstract, emotion centric animation and I am decently good at tackling things with only the plans in my head. However, this wouldn’t work for ideas with strict narratives. One issue I ran into was timing- initially, the shots that I envisioned as being long and drawn out were too short. This was because I had accidentally calculated the number of frames wrongly, so the film turned out shorter than 30 seconds. Since I finished animating early in order to fix problems like this, I was able to add more scenes and re-edit my film to fit the time brief and make each shot more effective.
In addition, I animated this entire thing in a square aspect ratio. I’m not sure how I missed the 16:9 aspect ratio but I had to add a banner either side to make it fit properly. This did turn out really well and I like what I did, but it’s annoying that I missed that and will have to look more carefully in future.
After I finished animating and edited in the music I wanted, I found that voice overs really wouldn’t fit in, but I still felt like the sound design needed something more. I’ve always liked working with horrible chewing/eating noises for spookier films so I looked around on freesounds to find something. I came across some great noises that had the texture I needed.
Final animation
Please make sure you’re viewing in HD/1080p!
In addition, this YouTube channel is under my legal name rather than my preferred one, which is why it says that rather than Ross or Roscoe.
Overall, I’m really proud of myself! I’m so pleased with how this turned out, and know my work will only get better. It’s a great start to the year.
In particular, I’m proud of the chest cutting shot. The slow, jagged movement of the hand contrasting with the fluid blood is something I’m especially proud of. I mixed straight ahead for the blood with pose to pose for the hand, which turned out very effectively.
One thing I’d like to improve on his the overall movement. I’m recovering from an RSI that affected me in the foundation year too, which means I can’t push myself too hard and take risks with animating since I can only draw for so long at a time. It’s deeply frustrating and truly the main thing holding me back right now. However, if I were to do this again post recovery, I would love to include more fluid movements. I think the style and subject matter lends itself to slow shots but I’d still like to do small, impactful movements.
Music and sound credits:
All of these are edited by me in some small ways. For example, changing speed and pitch.
Music: ‘On Questions Of Responsibility Act 3’ by LLoyd Rodgers from pixabay
Sound Effects: ‘Tearing Apart Chicken Carcass’ and ‘Eating Juicy Meat’ by ProductionNow from freesound
References:
Adventure Time, (2021). [Animated Episode] Cartoon Network. 3 Dec. Episode name: “All The Little People.”
Adventure Time Wiki. (n.d.). All the Little People. [online] Available at: https://adventuretime.fandom.com/wiki/All_the_Little_People [Accessed 19 Nov. 2021].
Millard, P. (2014). Bomb. [Animation done in paint and pencil] Available at: https://vimeo.com/109336300 [Accessed 19 Nov. 2021].