Ritual Reflection

Ritual has by far been my favourite out of all of the projects we’ve done so far. However, it’s also been the hardest, by a long shot. Getting back from Venice I had a few ideas of what I wanted to do, but nothing solid and nothing written down. I hit the ground running, coming up with my idea and storyboarding it all in one day. My plan was to design on Monday, then spend Tuesday and Wednesday animating.

However, surprise surprise things didn’t go quite how I planned. When it got to about 3am on wednesday morning I realised that I wasn’t going to get it done in time. So I had to make a choice of how I wanted to proceed. Either two rushed, shorter animations or one longer and more polished animation. I decided to go for the one polished animation as I didn’t want to show something rushed and sloppy at the crit. This did mean that I had to alter my original storyboard.

Whilst ultimately I think I did the right thing by choosing to just make one animation, I do regret not being able to make my original film. I feel that my original idea had an actual message to share and bit of meaning behind it. The film that I’ve ended up with is nothing more than a silly cartoon, which isn’t really what I was going for. I wanted to explore masculinity in crisis, something I had spent a lot of time investigating when doing A-Level film studies. (Iron John by Robert Bly was a very helpful and interesting book). The pre-historic, ultra masculine coming of age ritual was going to be juxtaposed to today’s modern right of passage of just going out and getting pissed. I’m sad that I couldn’t cover this aspect in my animation, but I can save the ideas and hopefully look at it again sometime in the future. I am still proud of what I created in just 3 days.

Ritual

My flash animation based on the keyword of ‘Ritual’

Created in 2 days.

(Youtube has made the film run a bit slowly, especially with transitions between scenes and at the start of some tweens. Don’t know why but I can’t seem to fix it :/)

Project Development – Ritual

Project Brief – Ritual

“In this project you are asked to make a short piece showing an individual carrying out some kind of activity or exhibiting some kind of behaviour related to your interpretation of the theme “ritual”. However, this piece is not simply a record of an event, the activity should be used as a vehicle for revealing something about the person involved. The activity may be subtle and intimate or large and expansive. It may be an unusual event or very ordinary. It may be that the activity itself reveals a lot about the person who is carrying it out or it may be the way in which it is carried out that is revealing. Other people may be involved in the activity but the piece should focus on one individual.”

Week Reflection 11th – 15th November

Overall I actually really enjoyed myself this week. The drawn animation activity on Monday was not only great fun, but also taught me a lot about timing and spacing. It’s one thing being able to animate on a computer, but having all the sheets of paper right there in front of you really forces you think about what you’re drawing and how you want it to behave. You can’t just easily get rid of your mistakes using CTRL + Z anymore.

I didn’t have as much fun during the clay motion portion of the week, to be honest. I did enjoy being able to design and create my own character, that part was a really fun, but it was the actual animation that I struggles with. My figurine (after a certain other student’s fiddling) couldn’t properly stand up on its own without falling over, making it really bloody hard to animate. When I tried to change the different positions, my heavy handedness just ended up reducing the legs into two smushy blobs, as they heat had made the plasticine really soft. I must admit that I got so frustrated that I have up. I took my model home with me and I’ll have to rebuild it and re-animate it at another point in the future. Oh dear.

Artist Study – Adam Pesapane (PES)

Whilst I was doing my research during our pixellation/stop motion mini-project, I found one artist who had created a very unique and distinct style – PES.

PES is best known for his 2012 Academy Award Nominated film “Fresh Guacamole”, where a mysterious hand is cooking Guacamole using anything but the actual ingredients, replacing them with random objects such as a grenade, dice and a baseball.

Pesapane first became famous with his animated short “Roof Sex” in 2001(See above), which went on to win ‘Best First Short Film’ at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival and put PES on the map as an animator.

I chose to feature PES as an artist to study as his work has a great sense of humour and a charm that really appeals to me. He has a uniqueness and certain special quirkiness to his ideas that I hope to one day capture with my own films.

Fish Man Man Fish

The character I created for the Clay Motion exercise.

Focus Pull Reflection

Our project for this week was “Focus Pull”, in which we had to gather photographs of the UCA Farnham campus and organise them in a photomontage in a way that when viewed would give off the impression of a totally different environment, not a university campus. Our environment was “Factory”.

I think that this first project was very successful, considering that it was a photography based project and I’m not particularly skilled in that area, we managed to create a photomontage that people responded to positively in our critique and understood what we set out to do.

My group worked well together too. During the planning stages everyone was contributing ideas and adding to the discussion as to what our final outcome could possibly be. When it came to actually capturing the images, I took a bit of a step back as Mike was a lot more passionate about photography than I was and knew how to get the best out of our pictures. When it came to assembling out images, we once again worked well together and everyone got involved with the several iterations and evolutions that our photomontage went through.

In the critique session everyone managed to understand our location very easily, which I think shows how successful our resulting photomontage is. Nearly all of the crits commented on how they liked the narrative we had created visually through our choice of spacing. I’m especially pleased that people picked up on this aspect as it was something we tried really hard to create and incorporate into our montage.

The one negative point we did get during our feedback was that we were un original in our choice of locations. The person giving the feedback felt that going to use the workshop was too easy for our photographs. However I don’t actually agree with this, as we stuck with the rules that were given to us in the brief. We just got lucky that the workshop fitted in so well with our chosen word.

Overall I think that this project was a success and taught me about the important of visually communicating ideas and concepts to audiences, which is something that I can easily apply to the future animations that I will make.

Artist Study – Peter Foldes

Whilst doing some of my research, reading an article in “Animation: An Interdisciplinary journal” I stumbled upon the name of an Animator I had never heard of before – Peter Foldes. The article I was reading was talking about the use of keyframe animation in 3D animated films, such as “Shrek” and Foldes was mentioned as one of the first people to experiment with keyframe animation in the 1970’s, at the dawn of computer animation.

A quick search on youtube later and I had found what is believed to be one of the very first computer animated films. In this case folds drew all of the keys himself, then used a computer algorithm to calculate all of the in-betweens, which were generated by the computer. What this creates is a very bizarre effect which had never been seen before. I find that the animation looks oddly charming, with a pseudo 3D effect created due to the carefully calculated in-betweens.

Peter Foldes was best known for his Animated short “A Short Vision”, which explores the horrors of nuclear war and the potential destruction of all mankind. The film follows a missile as it flies over the countryside, then small towns and finally a large city before detonating, totally annihilating all the surrounding forms of life that had been previously shown. Due to its graphic nature the film caused a great deal of controversy when it was released in 1956, as it played on the fear of nuclear war that was so present in society at the time.

Foldes frequently collaborated with his wife, Joan Foldes on most of his projects. He died in 1977

Project Development – Focus Pull