New Ideas

I have decided to make some changes to the soundtrack of my animation, which will completely transform it. I have continued to watch more documentaries of child beauty pageants after being fascinated/horrified by the Living Dolls one I saw in the early stages of this project.

I have taken some audio clips from 'Toddlers & Tiaras' (all of which is available on YouTube) of girls as young as 3 talking about their daily make-up routine...



I am going to experiment with setting these to music as kind of snippets of speech that break up the animation, a structure which has allowed me to think of a narrative and begin creating a storyboard (coming soon)

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.

Gabriel Orozco

Instead of working in the lab on Wednesday we visited the Tate Modern to see the Gabriel Orozco exhibition.

If you don't feel like reading all those scribbles, here's a summary:

• Orozco reinvents everyday objects, taking them out of context or manipulating them slightly, to make them seem more unusual (I plan to do this!) examples: abstracted washing lines/laundry in 'Lintels', collected and laid out pieces of tyres, spat-out toothpaste turned into patterns...
• In his famous piece 'Black Kites' (from the exhibition poster)  he has pain-stakingly drawn squares onto a human skull.*
• In paintings like 'The Eye of Go' the artist uses black circles to create a sense of the scientific, as well as emulating the strange bubbles in 'First was the Spitting' (paintings which use toothpaste/spit as a starting point)

*this could be relevant to what I am doing with painting on doll's faces with black ink.

Kirsten Lepore

Just discovered this animator

she's been getting a lot of awards!!

Here's an everyday conversation about becoming a vegan...

http://www.kirstenlepore.com/

Make up/ body paint

I brainstormed 'the everyday' and daily routine

and decided to focus on the application of make-up as an everyday event that is often overlooked.

I found the following videos to start off my ideas, though I want to work on a smaller scale and with human-like objects rather than people.

This one from the early 60s is amazing as it also tells a story
I am considering also using prosthetics/ adding or subtracting parts of the face for a more extreme effect.

I need to begin brainstorming visually, for example sourcing objects, making models, and trying out effects and timing.

WHY MAKE UP? From a personal perspective and for many girls/women I interact with, make up is an essential part of everyday life and daily routine. A lot of people I know won't leave the house without make up, and shows like Snog Marry Avoid expose people who are so addicted to make up that it's scaring people away from them. I started my research with child beauty pageants, a perfect example of the unnecessary and horrific overuse of make up in everyday life. These 'living dolls' are barely recognisable under thick layers of tan, foundation, mascara, eyeshadow and glitter, looking more like mini drag queens than pretty little girls. I want to expose this sense of make up as a burden that congeals and conceals beauty instead of complimenting it.

Ruth Hogben/ other influences

I've been watching a lot of Ruth Hogben fashion films and, though not strictly animation, they have a fascinating contrast between fluid and jerky motion.

I also love her use of fast/slow motion, symmetry and repetition.

I watched an interesting interview where she said she starts not with the music, or a visual idea, but with the garments themselves. The rest of the ideas stem from this.

She has worked with Lady Gaga for her tour interludes and designers like Celine and Gareth Pugh, sometimes even replacing their catwalk shows entirely with her fashion films. This is the future!

I particularly like this Nick Knight film (edited by Hogben) which reminds me of the dark style of the Quay Brothers. It is inspired by Annie Chapman who Jack the Ripper killed on the site of my old workplace (All Saints, Jack's Place) so I feel quite a strong connection to it - we always said the building was haunted.

I have been re-watching films by the Brothers Quay and this has led me to consider using 3D animation - something i have not done since the first week. I might even use found objects/dolls as they have done, though I want a more colourful and updated interpretation.

Terrifying...

Jenni Rope - Healthy Obsession

Everyday

I have read through the brief and am yet to sit down and brainstorm visual ideas, but I know what audio I would like to use and plan to use this as a starting point.

The song reminds me of the frantic, rushed way I get ready in the morning as I'm always running late.

I want to do something quite humorous and simple, perhaps focusing on one character.

Inspiration: Marcel the Shell

This is a good example of an animation that's slightly longer (ours needs to be 1-2 minutes)

It was awarded Best Animated Short at the AFI FEST 2010 and was an official Sundance selection.

Seeing sound: initial ideas

Phonophani - Kvaale (the first track)

I have chosen this sound which for me evokes images of a slow journey home, trudging up a ladder or rolling down a hill.
It sounds exotic, dreamlike, and at times monotonous.

I have made some rough notes but will wait until I arrive tomorrow to start tranforming them into experiments.

In the meantime, I researched Phonophani. He is a Norwegian composer and his real name is Espen Sommer Eide. I found the following interesting videos:

Documentary

The most moving and memorable documentary I have ever seen:

You can find it all on Youtube.

'Research'

Basically I went on youtube for a while..

I tried to focus on music videos as we're starting the sound project

Music video for Pay TV - so bad they're good

Matthew Robins' Flyboy - amazing live

Toy Food - a silly song by (one of) the makers of Potter Puppet Pals

Jerry Jackson - my idol

T shirt war - me and my friend Beci wanted to do a similar one with facepaint, but never got round to it (yet)

Paper horse - only one sheet of paper, wow

The Knife, We share Our Mother's Health - their video for Like A Pen is good as well

Forkbeard animation school

Came across this while researching another project - more examples of amateur animations

Research (via Blackboard)

I watched 5 of the recommended animations and wrote these mini reviews:

Federick Back has been winning awards for his simple animations since the early 1980s. I watched a few and they look like children's book illustrations that have come to life. Their naive, simplistic style lends itself well to stories about children playing and cosy family scenes. They remind me a bit of The Snowman.

Watch Crac! here

John Kelly uses a mixture of real objects, mixed media, and drawn images to illustrate the concept of 'Procrastination'. He effectively uses a monotone, human voice (presumably his own) and sound effects along with everyday examples, to create humour. I actually prefer 'The Seed' which combines simple drawings with folded paper in a simpler way than before, and doesn't rely on speech to tell the story.

Watch Procrastination

Gili Dolev 's 9 minute long 'Happy Duckling' is a multi award-winning children's film about a boy and his duck. Though digitally animated, the characters and sets are made to look like they're made from paper and live inside a pop-up book. The characters control the set using tabs which I think is a novel idea and looks cute.

Watch The Happy Duckling

Nexus Productions is a site which showcases a variety of commercial animators' work.

My favourite is Jonas Odell who has made music videos for Franz Ferdinand and Goldfrapp. I also like Mighty Nice's 'kinetic typography' (a change of subject means a change in typography)

Watch them all here

Ferenc Cako uses sand to cleverly create simple scenes in front of the camera. He skillfully scatters sand from his hand to make dark areas then works quickly into it to create lines, destroying them with another wipe of his hand as soon as they are finished, to move onto the next scene. He manages to shift focus and 'zoom' in and out seamlessly to tell stories. This is not stop-motion in the strictest sense, it's really film, but I like it the most out of all these videos.

Watch Hungarian Dances

5 more coming soon...

Haunch of Venison/Nicholas Provost visit

On Friday we went to the Haunch of Venison gallery to see a small exhibition of work by video artist Nicholas Provost.

I hadn't heard of Provost before I went to the gallery, so it was interesting to go in with no knowledge about his work at all.

The gallery website calls says: His work is a reflection on the grammar of cinema and the relationship between visual art and the cinematic experience.

A piece that really stood out was the disturbing 'Long Live the New Flesh' which recycles gory scenes from well-know horror films (Alien, The Shining etc) and splices them together with disorientating and psychedelic moving pixels to create something truly disturbing.

TRAILER:

Even scenes of more favourable subject matter (kissing scenes for example in 'Gravity') were unsettling as the 'stroboscopic' frames shifted too quickly for my eyes to focus on any one character, however I liked this film as the choice of 50s romantic film footage worked well.

The last piece I saw was 'Stardust' in which Provost imbues ordinary hidden-camera film footage of everyday scenes with intense drama by adding music and dialogue, making it seem like a crime story. This was an excellent piece to show how different sounds can transform visual material and I will make use of this idea when starting the first project.

MORE (Nicholas Provost's website)