When
deciding how to start the experimental project, I laid out ideas on how to
proceed with the narrative before deciding on how to animate it. I decided to
focus on making the animation be more experimental than the narrative. This
choice was made as I believed a simpler narrative would be easier to follow so
that the audience may be given more time to understand the context behind the
way my experimental project was animated.
I
originally had trouble deciding on how to make the animation more experimental
and came up with the idea of animating using water. The original idea was to
use a tub of water as the background while a clear pane is set on top of it. A
syringe would be used to apply drops of water on the surface of the clear pane
to create characters and movement to tell the narrative. After some testing, I
concluded that this method of experimental animation was not viable as it made
the narrative too incomprehensible and was a rather difficult method of
animation and storytelling.
While
researching new methods of animation I decided to base the majority of the
animation on a pendulum swing. As this was one of the first animation exercises
I did in the first semester, I thought it would flow well into an experimental
animation about a self portrait. The rest of the self portrait would be done in
a 2D animation done in TVPaint. This method of animation and storytelling was
also a more effective method of animation in terms of clarity and time.
I decided the
story for the self portrait would be a retelling of key moments from my
adolescence. When I began working on the animation, it became difficult to tell
which character was me due to the ranging hairstyles. I decided to make it
clear that I would be on the left side of the shot throughout the majority of
the animation by establishing early on through my caricature constantly on the
left side of the shot.
The
pendulum swing was also supposed to be reminiscent of the swing of a
grandfather clock as an analogy for the passage of time. Around 40 seconds in
up to the point where I reach university, I planned for the pendulum to stop
and transition into stop motion film. I decided to use 2 pence coins to sprawl
onto the last frame of the 2D animation that I printed out, as I originally
used a 2 pence coin to simulate the pendulum swing. The movements of the coins
were supposed to simulate a circling motion similar to how a plane would travel
around the world. This was meant to represent the transition from Malaysia to
the United Kingdom. The ending shot was planned to include a stop motion shot
of my hand shifting the coin into a pendulum swing in order to make the point
as clear as possible at the very end.
In conclusion, the experimental project has allowed
me to find new ways of animating through trial and error. Looking at other
people’s experimental animation also helped me widen my perspective on what can
be done with animation.
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