As much as I hate to use the whirlwind of grad film as an excuse, grad film making has been quite hectic for the most part.
But this animation test I was able to do near the end of September, actually.
The theme for this week was
Deep in Thought
Also, as an expansion from the previous week there is an emphasis on lighting and shading.
The class spent time focusing on breaking from a flat 2D world and going to mediums of 2.5D & 3D puppet animation.
My approach was an aside from puppetry but used 2.5D techniques that allowed for experimentation with lighting and shading.
One of the things I wanted to try this semester in Experimental Animation was torn paper, so I took this as an opportunity to work with that. More importantly, it is a technical facet I am hoping contributes to how I animate the storm and tornado in my film. Thus what I did with the paper is try to get a sense of movement through tears in the paper that are shot in stop-motion.
What resulted was the look of an upward wind that can be interpreted as storm winds.
Potentially I want to try compositing this on to the figure of a tornado.
To satisfy the Deep in Thought theme for this week,
I composited an animation test on top of the ripped paper. A night not long before this assignment was due I went to a film screening and was left with a particular shot that stood out in my mind. It was of a man thinking about what he had done, starting with a close up of his hands, tilting the camera up as he raised them closer to his eyes and finishing with his distraught face framed with his hands along the bottom, open and shaking. This test is a rough of my main character performing that act as I felt it suited the tone of my film well.
