Monday
This week was all about materiality and how could we push the limits of the material chosen.
A film we were shown that particularly stood out to me was Jane Aaron’s Travelling Light. I liked that it makes you believe it’s one thing at first and then it’s revealed that it’s actually another.
Our first task was about hand drawn animation and after being shown some films we were left to explore the process ourselves. We had to all start with the same square template and go from there. I tried out straight ahead animation as I feel it is the most organic.
The test I ended up with was okay, but it didn’t excite me very much, I liked the movement but maybe if it was a different material like ink, or clay it would feel more intriguing to me.
Wednesday
On Wednesday we continued with our hand drawn test, but Chris introduced an idea to fold our paper over and over to create six smaller frames out of one piece of paper, forcing us to change the scale in which we were drawing and see how that would effect the final animation. I found this addition to make the process much more exciting and satisfying as there were more challenges with this, forcing me to be creative.
I wanted to see what else I could do with this process and thinking back to this first day with the rubbings, I was inspired by all the different textures and wanted to see how that could look animated.
I drew out the square template in the centre of the paper for 24 frames and found as many textures around my room as I could.
Friday
Friday was our first session in the stop motion room, where we brought in our own materials we wanted to explore and creating our own tests.
After my sudoku test I was really interested in using the newspaper as inspiration, especially the puzzle sections. It got me thinking about printmaking and how I could use other methods of printmaking to animate, in this case I was looking into monotype.
I thought the crossword puzzle would be an interesting one to play with. The shape is similar to the sudoku (a square grid) however certain parts are blocked out which makes for a distinctive, iconic look.
I did some tests with a receipt as well and that turned out to be an interesting look, however for this specific animation, I was focused on the crossword.
I think the final test was successful, whilst the outcome is not what I thought it would look like, I ended up liking it more. That you could see where my hand was pressed on the ink when drawing gives it a very human feel that I liked.
As the ink dried fairly quickly, the drawings are rough and often unfinished, but this gave a more interesting movement for the animation.
I found this outcome interesting as these crossword shapes are something you see perfectly printed in the newspaper with its’ blocky shapes and uniform lines, so it was nice to see it in a messy unconventional way.