2. WEEK 1
In our first animation class we learned about the criteria of our project and
we watched some student made animation that were highly graded, such as
Cassandra’s Shadows, and ones that weren’t so highly graded. We also
watched some other animations over the internet.
We were split into groups and sent to the rostrooms with a task to create
stop motion animation of something fast, something slow, and something
exploding, particularly to experiment with movement. Before we started this
task, Ceiren quickly refreshed what we learned form the induction course about
Dragon Frame.
3. Julia and I worked together and we started discussing
ideas for the real assessed animation. We both had
something similar in mind, an animation that was more
metaphorical than narrative driven, something perhaps
that explored “change”, and a meaningful or even
spiritual message behind it.
In the practice we also got a notion about looping and
reusing previous shots in animation to help with the
motion.
Finally everyone discussed any possible ideas they
had in mind and we split in possible groups that could
work with the same ideas.
4. Julia and I went to the library do some visual research and watch
some animation in order to thing of a concept for our animation. We
watched:
This Land is Mine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evIyrrjTTY
MAN (one of my favourite short animations)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU
Max Ernst (we were inspired by the ink on water effect)
http://vimeo.com/55165041
Julia showed me some of her own experiments.
5. WEEK 2
Julia created a pinterest for us so
we could create a kind of
moodboard and pin all the
inspirational things we found.
http://www.pinterest.com/jfabiolla/
6. IDEA
This week I had about 6 ideas/themes for animation and Julia and I had
a meeting where I showed her my ideas. We picked the two favourites and
she convinced me of how we could combine them both.
Main idea: the mind needs to be free, therefore I thought of the
metaphor of the mind being a caged bird that needs to be fed (with
knowledge, etc) until it gets too big for the cage that it “explodes” and
becomes free.
7. MY INSPIRATION
My idea was inspired by the open minded environment at
Goldsmiths and its challenging theory courses, as well as by
some other forms of art I’ve seen in the past such as
illustrations, poems and animation. The following slides get
together some pieces of work that have inspired me to come
up with this idea of the mind being a bird that needs to be set
free.
9. Animated version of the poem by Monika
Umba:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsc3ItAKSLc
10.
11.
12. IDEA DEVELOPMENT
Julia and I developed the idea into a narrative.
A big bang turns into an embryo. We see a child exploring the world in a garden.
When sitting on a swing, a perspective change shows the child’s head which contains
a nest with an egg. In bed at night, the child reads a book and the egg slowly cracks
and a bird is born. The child becomes aware of the bird and interacts with it. While
sleeping, a shadow comes and imprisons the bird in a cage. When older, the
character goes into a search for the encaged bird that left a hole in their head. Three
searches are shown: knowledge, art and spiritual. During each search, we cut back to
the bird that is growing bigger in the cage. By the spiritual search, the bird is to big
and explodes the cage, with a lot of artsy things coming out and finally freeing the
bird.
13. MESSAGES
Beginning: we are all infinite beings
Ending: so is the mind – limitless, mysterious and
infinite.
Middle: in order to free our minds we need to “feed
it” with knowledge, art and spirituality.
15. STORYBOARD I
Julia and I had another meeting in order to make the storyboard and
simplify the idea as it was very complex to make. Julia suggested that we went
with something less obvious and less narrative driven, more symbolic,
therefore she suggested we get rid of the character and only have the bird.
She suggested that the embryo turned into a brain and then into a bird, and
then into a bud of an embryo, leading to the big bang, where the bird would
come out flying.
We started worrying about which material to use, and Julia was trying to
convince me to use oil paint on glass.
16. POEM
Bud of a being
Embryo
Brain
Bird
Bud
BANG
From the Bang
Comes the Bird
A shadow traps the bird
Into darkness
Encaged
Stillness
17.
18.
19. IN CLASS (WEEK 2)
Everyone discussed their ideas, and Osasu (new to class)
joined our group.
The three of us watched the oil paint animations by Em
Cooper that Julia pinned.
We experimented animating a bird flying and then a bird
being encaged by bars coming down.
23. MANDALA INSPIRATION
Why mandalas? Mandalas are a spiritual symbol in religions such as
Buddhism and Hinduism, representing the universe. They often carry sacred
geometrical forms, usually, a square with four gates containing a circle with a
center point. Many mandalas resemble the appearance of a lotus flower, or the
flower of life, which are also sacred spiritual symbols.
I have created digital mandalas before, with a variety of different
techniques, and I believe it might be useful as an inspiration for the mandalas
we will need to hand paint in our animation.
I have also seen many tutorials of how to paint mandalas on CDs, stones,
etc, which may be useful.
24. Time lapse spinning mandalas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V573FpKb2Bk
Stop motion mandala painted on stone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzZ6THuNJ0U
DIY mandala painted on CD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U50Am87344E
25. PRACTISING PAINTING
From our attempt to animate a painted bird in lesson, I found out that I do not
have very good painting skills. Julia is the one who can paint, however it is not
fair for her to make everything, therefore I decided to start practising.
27. WEEK 3
Julia texted me ideas that she had for our new storyboard. Sasu and I met with her to discuss and
finalise the idea.
The idea went a completely different way. Julia suggested:1. Starting with an abstract imagery that
resembled feathers, and then showing the bird wings and the bird flying across a stream and a beautiful
landscape, over a sweet bird song.
2. The bird rises up and the background gets more orangey as it gets closer to the sun. The shadow
comes and traps the bird, where we have a moment of darkness.
3. A close up of the bird face with human eyes show the bird in despair, trying to scream and we
hear crow sounds. The bird gets colourless and the setting becomes gloomy. It starts flapping its wings
in a cry for freedom again.
28. WEEK 3
4. Sasu and I had the same idea about zooming into the bird’s eye
pupil in order to show the three levels of freedom, which originally were
knowledge art and spirituality.
5.Cutting between the bird’s pupil, a storm inside of him, his wings
flapping and getting more colourful, a lot of colours mixing together, and
finally the pupil becomes the center of a mandala.
6. This is the climax of the bird’s enlightment, by then he is very
colourful and finally breaks free from the cage, flying away together with
thousands of other little birds.
29. IN CLASS
We finally completed our storyboard, using oil crayons and a lot of
colours to really picture the feeling of our animation.
Began to discuss about sound – beautiful bird song at the
beginning, a croak sound when trying to scream in the cage, perhaps
some bells and Tibetan bowls with OM chanting in the spiritual
enlightment process.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35. WEEK 4
Julia was in charge of doing the animatic, and I decided to research
possible sounds that we could use in our film.
I separated sound for three moods found in our film: gloomy,
inspiring/hopeful, and spiritual.
Julia and I got together to watch the animation and try out mixing
sound, since Osasu was ill and couldn’t join us.
The use of sound and the addition of some moving effects (i.e. zoom)
really added to the feeling of the animatic, giving a really vivid idea of how
it will look.
36. WEEK 4 IN CLASS
This week we needed to prepare to start filming. Firstly we established
the set up: lights and double glass plane. Then we discussed whether the
bird should be drawn with pastels on acetate, or oil paint too. We also
established that most cases where the bird is flying, the bird should be on
the top plane and the background on the lower plane. We even created a
new language to identify which shots happened in a double plane (DP) or
single plane (SP).
To create the double planes we needed to use video cassette tapes
as a base for the top plane.
37. We tried to make a schedule and this is where the challenge
began. Ceiren suggested we split jobs in order to organise the
shoot more easily and to maintain consistency in the artwork,
which resulted in Julia doing the birds (with oil paint on acetate),
me doing the backgrounds, and Sasu doing other stuff like
extreme close ups of the eyes.
We decided to start shooting some more straight forward
shots to give Julia time to finish the birds properly, and then start
filming the bird flights as soon as possible.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42. LIST OF BACKGROUNDS
Stream (forest)
Van Gogh starry night (storm)
Dark blue storm (lightning)
Blue sky (flight sequence)
Blue sky turns orange
Orange sky (sun)
Ashy gray (cage sequence)
Mandala background
Water + sky going orange
(breaking free sequence)
43.
44. WEEK 5
This week we started filming. I have made all the
backgrounds we needed and discussed how some were not
necessary to be ready made.
Our first shoot was on Wednesday, and we filmed three
sequences of extreme close ups of the bird’s eyes.
45.
46. Filming took 9 hours due to the amount of detail and the blinking
sequences. Sasu was in charge of the painting and I was directing and in
charge of Dragon Frame. She was painting over the traces she drew. We
learned to be careful when painting the glass because it has moved and it
created a mismatch jump between frames. I suggested taping the glass down
in order to prevent that.
47. On Friday I suggested that for the art sequence,
in order to turn it meaningful, we could make the
colourful paint form a nest with eggs (resembling the
little birds in the end).
We filmed the storm sequence, which presented
various challenges, taking another 9 hours to film.
In order to zoom into the eye and the pupil
become the storm, Julia suggested painting the close
up of the eye on glass over the starry night
background, leave the pupil blank and widen it up until
it becomes the whole setting.
She outlined how much of the frame was actually
under the camera to spare unnecessary work.
48. At first we tried using double planes where the top plane would be for the
pupil widening and the lower plane would go on top of the background for the
addition of stormy effects and stars.
I directed most of the set up of this scene and I very much disliked the way it
looked under the camera because the colours looked like they had a green
aspect to them. It also showed reflection of the tripod on glass, so I suggested
we removed the upper plane. This solved such issues.
In order for the widening of the pupil to work, Julia needed the pupil to start
quite small, and this was an issue as making the eye smaller wouldn’t cover the
whole background. I therefore suggested she painted the background white
representing the sclera of the eye and zoomed in more. Then as we opened the
pupil, the camera zoomed out slightly until it reached the framed Julia marked.
49.
50. We played with lights to create lightening effects. Once we had the full
background on frame, we started animating the storm with stars and dark
shadowy clouds.
The sequence looked very fast and jumpy because we didn’t realise we
needed smoother movement of the clouds, we just changed it radically every
frame.
I came up with the solution of making them coming in slowly, adding a piece
to their front and removing a piece from their back.
They meet in the centre becoming a hurricane, inspired by Aleksandr Petrov
‘The Mermaid’ oil paint animation where there is also a storm sequence.
51. ALEKSANDR PETROV
The storm sequence that inspired us in ‘The Mermaid” at 9:02:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MpAr3rcEg0
52. On Saturday I was still very concerned about our storm sequence
because it was really fast. Thinking about a solution, I came up with
the idea of looping the shadows coming in, but in reverse, so they
come in and out and this motion of shadows coming in and out could
be looped to endure the storm sequence.
Sasu and I filmed the facial close up and the zoom in to the eye
took very long because it was slow movement. I mainly directed the
shot and took care of the focus. I suggested that as the camera moved
inwards, the glass should move slightly upwards to the side in order to
maintain the eye in a good frame.
53. • We wanted the bird to blink, and at first
Sasu would paint it frame by frame.
• To solve this, she came up with the idea
of painting the eyes on acetate.
• I suggested that she could use a double
plane of glass to put the acetate on top
and trace the eye shape. Then we’d cut
the eyes off the acetate and put them on
top of the eyes of the bird already
painted on glass.
• This spared us so much time and it was
a shame we didn’t think of it earlier.
54. • Meanwhile Sasu was painting the bird, I was
experimenting drawing and painting Mandalas.
55. • This experiment was very useful
because it made me realise a
series of things:
• It’s not easy to make mandalas
just out of paint, it is better to
trace it first.
• Mandalas are very detailed and
painting every detail takes really
long.
• The initial idea was to have the
mandala building up in front of
the camera but due to the two
issues I found, I decided that I
would make a mandala
beforehand and only build up the
last outer layer of the mandala.
56. WEEK 6
• Julia and I came during reading week to do
the art sequence
• We didn’t have much of a plan of how this
sequence would work, only that it would
form a nest. Nest inspiration:
57. • The art sequence didn’t escalate very well. Everything got a bit
smudgy and the tones don’t feel the same as the rest of the movie.
• We finished it quite fast and decided to try filming the opening
sequence of the feathers.
• The feather sequence took a lot of figuring out, we wanted a similar
effect to an animated music video we watched.
I figured out how to do the movements of the feathers, but it was still a very difficult
shot to manage, because we had to keep adding to the tip of the feathers and the oil paint
got mixed, and yellow became green, the blue became darker, everything looked smudgy.
We gave up on this shot
58. WEEK 7
In class, I started doing the artwork for the mandala, I experimented with several materials, CDs,
pastels, acrylic paint, in the end I drew a big mandala and Sasu traced it with oil paint over acetate.
Meanwhile I was doing mandala artwork, Julia was trying to work on the feather sequence again
(both Julia and Sasu had a go), but the issues were not solved. We reached a conclusion that we
could do the feathers on acetate and then trace them on top of another acetate, moving the parts
that needed to move, this way solving the problem of the oil paint mixing.
We decided to leave the feather sequence out. On the weekend we came to film the mandala
sequence. Julia suggested we cover the mandala painting with another acetate, and she wanted to
experiment with mirrors. The mirrors gave a kaleidoscope effect, we spent some time figuring out
how we could make this sequence. Julia was ill and we decided to leave it for another day.
60. WEEK 8
Wednesday – The mandala sequence was directed by me. In order to
make the colour of the shots warmer, we used orange filters made of
tissue paper. Julia covered the edges of the mirror with tape so it wouldn’t
scratch the glass. We played with mirrors in different positions to achieve
different effects and also we experimented different paces. We also
played with focus to give a trippy effect and show a change in the bird’s
own focus. Lastly we added a red filter to change the colour of the
mandala.
61. Friday – In class we started
filming our opening sequence of the
bird flight over stream. We had one
big issue, which was Julia painted the
bird flights on acetate, but she only
had two pieces of acetate, thus she
cut the birds out into squares. The
issue was the edges of the acetate
under the camera.
62. We tried several things in order to solve the issue, different lights, different
focus (the edges would become less noticeable but still would be visible,
especially with motion). We added colour filters to the lights in the ceiling (which
we kept because they gave a nicer colour to the scene). We tried painting the
edges with the background (which only made the edges more visible).
63.
64. Finally, I figured out what
the solution would be. We’d
need to have the forest
background underneath a
glass, the bird on top of this
glass, and then have a higher
plane of glass on top of the
bird, where we would paint
over the edges of the acetate.
65.
66. The flight was quite
fast, cuts and
establishings could help.
68. SYMBOLISM
Bird – free, it is colourful because it is creative, imaginative, inspiring.
The primary colours blue red and yellow are the colours that make all the
others: we can create limitless possibilities.
Nest and egg – rebirth
Storm – “Brain storm”, the bird is thinking
Human eyes – metaphor for the human
The shape and orange colour of mandala – resemble the sun
Sun – enlightment, warmth, life, Icaro greek myth
