Animation Messy 2

This assignment has a theme - Weight of the World

In class, we were given an introduction to 2D puppetry... although due to my grad film ideas limiting how far I explore with mediums I didn't partake in that medium for that week.
Instead I tried to develop more exploration with sand on glass.

As far as this week's theme went, I tried to focus mainly on the words and the emotional weight it brings.

Words that come upon contemplating
Weight of the World:

heavy

dark

difficult

trial

grand

purpose

desperate

suspense

destiny

I couldn't exactly cover all of these words but they definitely added fuel to the process.
I started by aiming to capture the rough, heavy texture of the black sand.

This test added an extra element of visual chaos to the Weight of the World - Successful

This was another test in capturing the heavy texture, again showing chaos - Not so successful

Another stab at the texture, this one speaks more to the vision of my film - Kind of successful

This test speaks to desperation, and in my eyes also to destiny - Successful

This test is purely experimenting with the vision of my film -  Not Successful

Here's me experimenting with the footage that I have in After Effects to see what happens to the successes and the not-successes when they are added together.

Doing these tests was good insight into the possibilities of my film and also into the possibilities of the medium in general.  There are some things I would like to keep developing and some that I think I won't mind putting behind me for now.  What I am hoping for, the more that I think about it, is to become competent enough to execute a few select ways of animating sand to be able to take that into a more commercial context... although right now I would also be content letting the sand take over certain parts of the film.

What I will definitely take with me is the boiling texture from the first test, and perhaps develop a texture from the 2nd or 3rd test.  But the hand and the top view of the tornado can be put aside for now... but if the urge returns I'll use it and attempt variations of these tests.

Just as long as I give myself the time to set up and clean everything up again.  That took a while.

Overall, I definitely have more appreciation for the works I've seen that were done using the sand-on-glass technique and feel excited to have partaken in a similar fashion.

Animation Messy 1

Here is my first 'animation messy' assignment that was created for the 2nd week of September.  This was my first time experimenting with sand on glass animation so there was a degree of adjusting to the medium.  The sand offered a very defined texture to it that doesn't take much effort to create as opposed to creating texture with pencil, although erasure isn't very possible in the same way thus going frame to frame took getting used to.  On the glass surface you can't exactly see where the sand was on the previous frame... although using the software, Dragonframe, it was possible to onion skin the previous and following frames to use as reference to animate.


Overall, this test was frustrating because I couldn't get exactly what I wanted right off the bat.  When I was slowly adding sand frame by frame to describe the fingerprints there would be times where I added too much or not enough... but I would only notice this after I shoot the frame, which by then (to me) meant that it was too late (because of the inexperience of handling sand on glass well... I didn't want to remove too much or accidentally knick it in a way that stood out).

Right off the bat it was difficult for me, but eventually I just learned to go with the flow and embrace the mistakes that happened.  So after I finished building up the sand in to the form of a full hand, I shot a few extra frames and then began to experiment with less thought behind the movement.

I began to play.

I played around with the sand texture in the palm of the hand for a few frames,

then started playing with the fingers, eventually trying to make the hand close into a fist.

Then I kept playing with the swirling in the palm and eventually made it sweep away off into space.

This last part was the most enjoyable and got me into a rhythm of animating that didn't involve much frustration - which is something I think every animator could use every now and then.



To make more sense of how my animation test turned out, I formed a mini narrative and complimented it with a flash animation.

This messy described the sense of touch, and I pictured a hand reaching out to this white space only to be swept away.  So I introduced it with a hand reaching out in flash.

If I may, this may be a way of describing my reaching out from the commercial flash approach to animating in the experimental form of various mediums.  I'll try not to read into the being swept away part, though.



I'm not a converted experimental animator just yet, but I enjoyed taking this first step of exploration.