Elective 2: Monochrome

I was absolutely mesmerised by the ‘RUG’ animation, I found it really interesting how such an exciting animation could be made from just one rug by repeating the same sections of patterns but in different colours from different points of the rug. The details themselves come together along with the intense sound to create something really fascinating. I also loved the little inclusions of the cat towards the end as they somewhat took you out of the sequence of patterns and yet they still felt fitting but that may also be because of the influence of the sound which I find really effective in drawing you into this work.

I really liked this animation that we were shown called ‘Serial Parallels’, I was drawn to how simplistic it was with pictures of buildings but the patterns that they formed and the shifting motion as different sections went up and down was mesmerising. I like how it uses a lot of repeat patterns and imagery and yet each section feels new. I also feel like the sound matches the imagery very effectively which is something I want to consider with what I work on as often I neglect the importance of sound. I find it interesting in this as well how some parts feel quite like replacement animation where the different windows change in and out because they’re all of the same shape and size.

INTO THE WOODS TASK:

List of books looked at and explored:

• Aesop’s Fables
• An American Bestiary
• Crow – Boria Sax
• Birds in Greek life and myth – J. Pollard
• Flying Birds – David and Katie Urry
• Historic Motor Cycles – David Burgess Wise
• The illustrated book of herbs – Gilda Daisley

I quite enjoyed this task as I wandered up and down a few aisles of the library and looked through books that caught my eye with interesting titles and covers but stuff that I otherwise probably would have never even noticed or considered. I found myself drawn to a lot of books with very natural imagery or imagery about birds. From the task with the squares I had this image of birds quite clearly stuck in my mind as being something I wanted to consider exploring so when I stumbled across an array of books with birds/bird imagery I was very drawn to what I saw. I loved how a lot of older illustrations of the birds felt like they were only vaguely bird shaped creatures rather than these perfect life accurate depictions of birds as well as other animals.

Different recordings of paper noise experiments from working with paper texture and materiality:

I made use of the different materials we had in the classroom, like tracing paper, parchment paper and a very crumpled piece of paper and from moving them around and crushing them – crumpling them up, folding and shaking them, I got an array of different sounds which were fascinating to me. I think paper has a lot of potential to be a very interesting piece of audio that I could use for my final outcome as it has a lot of texture and character to it despite being such a simple material. I loved how crunchy some of the pieces of material were and how they made a sort of crackling noise which I think would be very interesting to utilise and revisit.

https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-14983792-raven-eye-crow-macro <- video reference of the close-up view of a crow blinking

I had never quite realised/acknowledged the fact that birds blink sideways unlike humans, I think this could be interesting for me to play with in my experiments and to consider having the bird blink in a more human fashion with more human eyes to add a level of uncanny to my animation. I did do an experiment on parchment paper with the blinking of a crow’s eye where I used layers of parchment paper to create the different frames of the eye blinking and stacked them to give the effect of it moving. This test was very short but I think the idea is quite fun and would be interesting to push further.

Crow blinking video

Making our Pixilation animation walk cycles was very fun and entertaining. We tried to do a couple of regular walk cycles but we actually found those a lot harder to do in pixilation as you had to consider the steps more so that it wouldn’t look completely peculiar but despite them being imperfect I found that it added quite nicely to the effect of the cycles. We also experimented with more abstract and random walking cycles with very tiny steps to replicate gliding and also spinning around and jumping – these were the most interesting walk cycles to me as they weren’t typical and the form of them was a lot more fascinating to create and to try and keep cohesive.

I looked at some reference videos of the way that birds – especially crows would fly. I also caught a video of what I thought was quite strange bird behaviour where there was a massive murder of crows sitting in two trees and flying between each of the trees and flying in from different places. You can hear in the background of the audio of the video just how many and just how loud the birds were. I wish I could have caught more of them flying from tree to tree nd flying in from all over the place as it was very peculiar and fascinating to watch. I also looked at some basic breakdown’s of the motions birds make as they fly but when I was animating whilst I looked at these shapes I only took on a loose interpretation of the shape and tried to sequence their spacing myself to add a different way of seeing how the flight would move through the sky.

I wanted to have a scene where the bird could fly across black, I intially experimented with the idea of painting the birds onto black paper but I didn’t think it looked very effective and they looked both too messy and unclear and also too realistic so I didn’t explore that idea any further as I did not think it would fit well with my ink animations. I decided to attempt a cutout animation of the bird flying instead as cutout’s had been very effective for my previous test so I wanted to see if it would work for this as well. I really liked how the sequence came out and thought that it felt very clean which was a nice contrast to my more abstract ink frames.

Sound of silence:

On the tram:

From inside my bag:

actual bird song from outside my window:

paper experimental noise:

ONEDRIVE LINK TO ALL THE AUDIOS IN CASE ANY DON’T WORK: https://artslondon-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/r_cork0520231_arts_ac_uk/EoVEYfPy6ZJJtHpkbMXq9YIBADmm_eE-U7wzhl5Suu1B9A?e=TVwJHB

I really had to trust the process with this project as I was following my own ideas that I came up with for each test along the way. I wanted to try new ideas and mediums from the tests that I had done – like using paper cutouts to animate with. I was greatly inspired by the birds from the magazine cutouts in one of our first tasks and then from the books I had looked at in the library to create an animation about the freeing nature of birds and flight. I often watch the local birds from my window and when on walks/commutes. I have always admired how they are so independent and free; they just go wherever the wind takes them independently or in huge flocks. So in my animation I wanted to explore the freedom of flight but also the repetitive nature of their lives. 

I wanted to work with ink as it was a lighter and more fluid medium to work with and I could hand paint each frame to capture the looseness that I wanted but I also wanted to add some contrast in. I initially had wanted to paint some of the frames as white on black paper but I found that they looked far too rigid and dull when doing this so I used a paper cutout technique I had used in one of my early tests. This was very effective and a perfect looping point for my animation. 

After I worked on the flight sequences, I didn’t have more of the animation planned other than the idea of a crow blinking with human eyes as I wanted to follow my ideas where they took me like a bird rather than be confined to an in-depth storyboard. I think this worked out quite well as it allowed me to become looser and more abstract like my tutor had suggested to me and allowed me as well to find a way to make the piece more cyclical. For the audio for my piece, I wanted to both use natural sound – recording the early morning bird song) and also make my own sound using paper like I had done in my earlier tests to replicate the beating of wings. 

Overall, I enjoyed this project. I pushed myself out of my comfort zone of simply character animation and made something more abstract and meaningful. Given more time, I would have liked to add in some more different flight sequences so that I had to loop less moments but also so I could consider gradually making them increasingly abstract as mine were still quite rigid.