Intro to animation
All my visual and artist inspirations, research, notes and ideas for my introduction to animation project.
For my intro to animation project my key inspiration was Baudelaire’s concept of ‘Flâneur’ and the idea of journeys, the wanderer and the observer. It was the last seminar we had before the project was assigned and yet it is the idea and series of artists from at seminar/workshop which stuck with me the most. I have always enjoyed observing the way the way that the world moves around me so the idea that there was an actual concept that had been observed for centuries behind it was fascinating to me. Initially, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to work with a singular illustration observing and capturing a fleeting moment from one of my journeys or if I wanted to create an animation with it. I then in passing created a mini comic on one of my journeys home.
This mini comic gave me the idea to create a series of different mini comics about my observations I make on my journeys but also observing myself in my day to day to add a bit of a spin on the idea of the observer; not only looking at the world around me but taking a moment for introspection and also considering how the world could perceive me back.
Flâneur (2022) – Ruiming Wu
Flâneur (2018) – Holly Warburton
Both these films share the title of ‘Flâneur’ which was fascinating and also slightly entertaining to me. I really like them both though, Holly Warburton has been a long term inspiration of mine and to find coincidentally that she had made a short film about flaneur was so brilliant as her visual style is something that really resonates with me. Ruining Wu’s film really stuck with me from Stuart’s lecture and I really adore the style of it and the way that it captures really what it does feel like to be travelling through London.
These are all of the pictures that I used as references in my project, a lot of it was just drawn from life and observation but in the points where I didn’t have the time to sit and draw what I was seeing or I needed a reference image for something like a tram or a train, I captured it myself and honestly I really enjoyed being able to draw from just my own images as references as I felt much more connected to them and I could take them at the angle I wanted and highlight the things that I wanted to take particular notice of.
Here is the picture of the dog which features within my project on the page which is a text message conversation between my friends and I about me seeing this dog and the I wanted to capture their reactions to the dog. I thought everyone would like to see the real dog because it as cute and brought me joy so I hope it brings it to others as well.
Different little snippets of audio that I recorded for this project. One of them is capturing the different conversations and sounds around me so I could transcribe them in a way inspired by Mitch Miller’s dialectograms, and the rest are different parts of train noise with their departure and arrival as I wanted to overlay it onto my final outcome so it wasn’t just silent and it would add a bit of depth and also a funny nod to it being about journeys and the iconic sounds of the trains.
Making this was a lot of hell, I got bored along the way having to repeatedly line different images, I struggled to come up with ideas for the end of the book (Thank you to Lecturer Jess and wonderful Maya for inspiring me with more ideas) because despite knowing how I wanted it to end, its hard to fill the other like 10 pages close to the end with stuff I haven’t done already. But you know what, I am incredibly proud of it, this is the first time I have finished an actual sketchbook for a very long time and I really like how it turned out and all the little details and playful elements within it. I hope others can relate to some of the journey experiences within here and enjoy the interactive visuals and the more silly and fun pages.