Everyday: experiments

I worked all day on editing the images I took last Friday as an experiment for my final piece. I was looking at things like composition, lighting, how quickly/slowly to move things, how I can give an inanimate object lifelike facial expressions, and general pacing of the animation.

These experiments caused me to think hard about what I want to achieve aesthetically with my outcome and what I want it to say as a finished piece.

1 - flickering light/mascara wand

This was just really to see the relationship between the doll, the mirror and the camera. I had to angel the mirror so as not to accidentally appear in the reflection. I also tried not to have my hands in any of the shots. The flickering light was unintentional, and I quite like it/ it reminds me of the Quay Brothers. I wanted to dwarf the doll with this big mascara wand to show a send of overwhelming and premature pressure to wear makeup.

2 - first attempts at moving mouth

This was fairly unsuccessful - the lips I made were too light in colour and too small.

3 - doll's head - mouth movements

This is the experiment I did before the longer animation at the bottom of this post, I was seeing what effects I could achieve with only 4 different mouth shapes. I like the balance of obvious artificiality mimicking real life. I'd like to film/study human facial expressions in more detail, for example that funny face people pull when they apply mascara.

4 - doll's head - eye movements

As with the lip movements above I have shown the video at normal speed and then slowed down to half the speed afterwards. Here I tried to creative the effect of blinking, but was less worried about making it appear realistic - I was going for more of an unsettling/sinister effect.

5 - longer animation attempt

I talked to Jason and Alejandra and they both mentioned that it might be better to zoom in more, so more of the screen is composed of skin; it would be better focused instead of having a lot of useless white background.

Jason also made the comment that it would be interesting to discard the mirror and have the doll facing/confronting the viewer. This will be my next experiment as it would be interesting to have the camera as a kind of mirror.