Process: At the start to this rotation, we were introduced to several animators and artworks, namely, ‘Conversation With a Whale’. This was to spark some inspiration, which in fact did to myself on potential future projects. One aspect that I really liked was its unconventional take on how they presented the animation, more specifically on how much of the process that was shown to the audience. Pencil shavings, rubbed out frames which is normally hidden and kept out of an animation perfectly encapsulates the mood of the animation which focused on the struggles of being an animator and rejection.
‘Conversations with a whale’ a film by Anna Samo
PRACTICAL TASKS
On our first practical work, we were tasked as a group to interpret and animate paper cut out shapes. For instance, I had cut out a triangle, the person next to me had a circle, so we had to animate from one shape to another around the table in order to have a complete looped animation of different shapes.
This task somewhat pushed my boundaries, because I never focused my attention on paper stop motion through the use of basic components such as shapes. This similarly also reflects the motion graphics rotation, which helped us exercise our creativity by simplifying ourselves as shapes and not heading straight to a detailed illustrated character as the majority of us would do.
Final rotation outcome – group task
For the outcome of stop motion, I worked collaboratively as a team, and learned how to successfully put together different ideas from each person in the group. What helped structure this was brainstorming notes of each concept we had, which was then refined into a storyboard. Storyboarding really helped us to understand what exactly we needed to do when we got to filming and made the process a lot smoother.
The reason why we had to combine our ideas was because each of us drew differently for each sound on the task that was given, so we used each drawing and made a concept out it. For instance, one of my teammates drew text bubbles reminiscent to the ‘cafe noise’, so we made newspaper cut outs to represent the ‘chatter’ and used replacement animation in the outcome. I drew relentless scribbles to represent how overwhelming the atmosphere was which was then translated to a wired knot that was put into the animation as a character that represented one of the noises in the audio.
insert drawings I made from the task
The overall concept worked well with the sound which brought the animation to life. We were considerably successful in experimentation and figuring out how to animate the shapes in various ways, i.e. growing/shrinking in size, movement, replacement, overlaying etc. One way we could have improved was by taking in more inspiration and having that show more in the outcome.
Time wise, we were very short on it, which pushed us to work within time constraints and successfully complete the outcome. What I learned the most on the rotation was understanding teamwork, and exploring other areas of animation I hadn’t really stepped into, for instance, replacement animation.
I am, however, overall content with what we have created and learned, especially when working together as a group.