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https://padlet.com/artslondon/production-principles-unit-sgkzu5t70zqa8klq
Out of your head was the most recent project where we had to work in groups to create a 30 second animation. This is a very open brief with a lot of freedom giving us the opportunity to explore what interested us following the rotations.
Me and my group were all on the same page since day one about what we wanted to create. We all had an interest in stop motion experimental animation. All of us were very open to all ideas and communicated very well.
On the first session of this project, we were discussing our chosen words from the word cloud and possible starting points and themes when we came across the words connection and community. When I thought of these words, my mind did not start coming up with a fictional story, with fictional characters in a fictional world.
Instead I thought of real-life people with stories to tell with their own voice.
We initially planned to go out and interview people that own corner shops; the idea being that we interview people who see many faces in and out all day but don’t necessarily get spoken to by their customers. However, we faced our first issue – a lot of people were not comfortable with their voice being recorded.
Then we found Hannah and her Ethiopian restaurant, Habesha. She was very willing and open to talk to us and showed a lot of interest in the project, it was refreshing to have such an honest conversation with a stranger.
We conducted another successful interview with a bartender in a nearby pub however in the end we decided to go with Hannah’s interview as the recording offered more opportunity for freedom with the visuals.
We soon began editing the audio down to 30 seconds as this would be our starting point for the rest of the project and we needed it as soon as possible. We had multiple drafts and versions of the audio before picking one to move forward with.
Our next stage was research, research, research! We needed to get into the headspace and world of our film as we weren’t creating anything new, it was all out there, but we had to find it.
So we decided to head back to Habesha to actually eat some Ethiopian food and talk to Hannah a bit more and understand who she was and her background.
Hannah was very happy to see us again and ended up sitting and chatting with us for 4 hours. She even gave us free traditional Ethiopian coffee.
Now we had a better understanding of who Hannah was and actually trying her food, we could now start thinking about creating some tests that could capsulate that environment and feeling.
We did some tests in a variety of materials. My particular favourite was the spoon and oil pastel, as it looks as if it’s the spice used to create the food – there was a certain feeling attached to these tests, we were trying to hold onto that sense of connection and community.
We got some great feedback from the tutors, the main takeaway being that we should not just be illustrating the words spoken in the audio; that the audience can hear what’s being said, they don’t need to see it too so we should try and expand our ideas further.
Chris also gave us a great piece of advice specifically about the pixelation test we made, that we animated what could’ve just been a live action video – if we are to use pixelation it should be something you couldn’t just film normally and would only exist in the stop motion world. This made us start thinking about how we could challenge and push ourselves more with these tests and opened our minds to more possibilities.
After our tests, we were feeling a bit lost in the project, we decided to create a storyboard to help put our visual ideas onto paper.
We split up the audio into different key sections and we all created a section of the storyboard individually and then bring it all together and create a rough animatic.
We were enjoying creating these visuals and ideas we wanted to explore, however we realised we were moving away from the more abstract visuals we initially wanted, and after watching our storyboard put together on the timeline, it became less exciting. The visuals we had were fine, but I knew there was more potential.
We decided to park the idea of the storyboard and continue doing material tests as we realised that was the most effective way for us to create new visual ideas – we could always revisit the storyboard now we had it.
These were our first tests with lentils and we saw how great it fit with our film and knew we needed to explore it further.
We got green lit before winter break and over the holidays I did some more material tests so we would feel more prepared when we came back.
When we came back after Christmas, we immediately began shooting for our final film. The next three weeks were spent completely in the stop motion room. As a group we were great at working together and communicating feedback respectfully to each other.
We began to introduce spices into our work as we wanted some variety in material other than lentils. The spices helped add to the atmosphere we were trying to create.
Pixelation was a feature wanted to include, as it’s something we thought was strong in the tests. So I created this sequence using a reference of the coffee pot from our visit to Habesha. After getting some feedback from Chris, we were told that although the animation was great, the image was getting slightly lost as the spice was a similar colour to the background.
Despite time running out, we reshot the sequence with different colours and saw an immediate difference.
The last week of the project was spent editing and figuring out transitions so that each sequence would flow nicely to one another as it would be easier for the audience to follow along.
Even though Hannah’s interview was our main audio, we knew early on we wanted to create foley for our film to help create the space and world that our film is in. We compiled a list of all the sounds we wanted, and all of us had a go at creating them, so we would have a range of options to choose from.
I massively enjoyed this project from start to finish. I really loved this method of storytelling – using real people and their voice. I’m proud of the work that me and my group have created and enjoyed how much experimenting we did with materials.
The final product obviously has flaws that with a bit more time, I would correct, such as the frame size of our dragon frame clips. We were all exporting out of dragon frame with the wrong setting, causing there to be black lines on the sides of the film. As well as this I feel as a group we could’ve been more organised with our time, as we submitted our film quite close to the deadline and if anything went wring whilst exporting, we may have missed the deadline. Obviously as stop motion animators, it is difficult to do any animating at home outside the studio but I think we should have sorted out our priorities where we could have done some more research and brainstorming work at home, to maximise our animating time.