RTS nomination

For the final semester of second year, my fellow Stop Motion students and I worked together on a group project based on the work of Edward Lear, I took on the role of Producer/Director and I can now be proud to say we have been nominated for a 2014 Royal Television Society student award!
You can see the finished film here: The Animated adventures of Edward Lear

ITFS: Crazy Horse 48 hour Jam competiton

Back in January myself and Naomi Blakeway put our names forward for the 48 hour jam, a competition run by the International Trickfilm festival in Stuttgart. In March we found out that we had been chosen to represent Great Britiain!
The challenge is to use the festival mascot, a rainbow horse called Trixi to complete a short animation in only 48 hours, competing against 4 other teams from across the globe. 

Luckily we had last year's competitor and alumni Nicola Everill on hand to give us some great advice, especially as we had chosen to work in Stop Motion, meaning we had to come up with a way of bringing our own camera rig to Germany. Initially we brainstormed ideas and started making models to take with us, however not knowing too much about what we could pre prepare we left them half finished just incase we were not allowed to use them!

Our idea was based around having a white horse that turned in to a fully colour crochet horse by the end of the film. Using a Damien Hurst style cross section to show the transition. Naomi began work on the white horse and the cross section,  and I began the crochet version. 

                                            

However when we arrived in Stuttgart and compared the two, they looked completely different, so after making a heartbreaking choice, I abandoned my half crocheted horse, instead deciding we would cover the white horse in thread for the final shot. Whilst Naomi finished the horse, I started gathering sounds to use and created the hay bale.

            


Day One of the competition was spent preparing our rig and models, as it was impossible to shoot in the daylight we waited till the sun went down to begin animating our first scenes, lasting until 3am before we caved and went home to sleep. You can see us hard at work on the festival video, 1min 27secs in:

Our names in the festival programme:

Day two was a more stressful experience as time was beginning to run away rapidly. We attempted to animate in the daylight but the constant lighting issues were making our lives hell! Luckily the festival staff took pity and relocated us to a photography darkroom where we could work. By midnight we returned to the main base to carry on, Naomi began to edit whilst I madly glued the coloured thread to the horse for our final shot, racing against the clock before the sunrise. Returning to the edit I began sorting out the titles and colour grading whilst Naomi added sound. We eventually had a finished film by 12pm the following day and after 24 hours with no sleep we could have a rest!

                            

            

                                              

                                                                     Final Trixi horse 

                                                   Walking through a very quiet Stuttgart at 5am!

                    

On Sunday we were called to gather for the presentation and award ceremony, this took place in the main city square. It was a very nerve-wracking affair to go up on stage and see my animation on such a big screen in-front of a huge crowd (especially as Naomi had unfortunately left early, and I was all alone!) I never expected us to win, especially only being 2nd year students, but I was very proud of what we achieved. It was an invaluble experience which taught me so much in such a small amount of time. There are a million and one things I would do differently but thats the beauty of hindsight!

        All the teams & last years winners attempting a very badly co-ordinated jump photo!

Experimental Animation exercises

Over the course of the semester I have been completing weekly tasks to build up an Animated Sketchbook for my Experimental Animation module. It has been great to just be let loose with these tasks, not have a plan and just go with my instincts. Definitely my preferred method of working!

                                                               Week One: Charcoal 

The brief was to brief find a piece of music and create a short animation that was in the style of William Kentridge. I chose a song by Yeasayer but didn't have a specific plan to what i would do. I chose to use a chalkboard and chalk and a textured paper with charcoal. This led me to create something which played with light and dark, creating a film about turning a light on and off. 

                                                       Week Two: Animated Journey

Using the work of  Stuart Hilton, Robert Breer and Jonathan Hodgson, as inspiration to create an animated journey. Having always wanted to make a film using a Super 8 camera I sourced an old camera but unfortunately found that processing costs of 16mm film is very expensive. After doing more research I came across a redeveloped hand cranked movie camera called a Lomokino by Lomography that worked using 35mm standard film. Using 9 rolls of film I documented my journey across San Francisco and LA, it was a bit of a gamble as I had no clue whether or not it would work, I even doubted if I had loaded the film properly as it felt like such a flimsy bit of plastic!

After developing the film I used a macro lens to film each frame of the negatives, a very laborious process! With the negative footage i inverted and colour corrected each scene in After Effects, I decided to leave it uncropped and show the white paper, i thought the changing colours added an extra feature.
                             

 The final result, I find, being like a sub conscious memory of a trip. When you look back on a holiday and have memories of places in fragments and short snippets. This is why i left in the footage that had not developed as it is like the gaps and blank moments. I was really happy with the final result, definitely a goal of mine which can be ticked off the list, and a big learning curve of how to use the camera better next time!

                                            

Week Three: Manipulated Images

Looking at Rotoscoping I sourced an old film clip I had recorded of a point of view on a swing. Splitting it into frames I then printed it out in black and white and began to manipulate each image. As the footage was of me swinging I wanted it to seem as though I was swinging into colour. I used watercolour paint to paint the frames then shot it under the camera, using a cardboard frame to keep each one in the same place.

Week Four: Pixelation 

For this week's task we had to work as a group to produce a film using Pixilation, using Norman McLaren's Neighbours as inspiration. It is always a challenge when working in a big group to agree on an idea but collectively decided to make something fun, using hopscotch. We all decided to edit our own versions, I wanted it to be quick and snappy with a light hearted soundtrack so I sampled a Kraftwerk track called Morgenspaziergang.

Week Five: Cycles & Replacements 

This task was to look at Eadweard Muybridge's photography and select a cycle to animate. I chose a cycle of a cat and used after effects to manipulate the image to create an animation. 

Week Six: Scratch Film

Looking at Len Lye's work, I was given a strip of 35mm film on which to scratch and manipulate. The strip that i got contained a few frames of footage of a close up of whiskey being poured into a glass. I used this as a starting point, zooming into the glass and creating an abstract view.

Week Seven: Experimental Drawing 

Our final task was to document a type of experimental drawing. After an unsuccessful attempt at getting my cat to draw a picture, i decided to go to my sewing machine instead. Using paper I fed it through the machine and created and abstract pattern using the needle as a pencil. I have decided that this technique could work really well for my Sky Arts Sting.

                                         

Test Footage

Test footage for character implemention.

Life drawing

After a long summer I was finally back in the life drawing studio, felt very rusty to begin with! I stuck with ink to begin with using a feather to draw which was difficult to control but gave some nice results. 

Explosyarn

One week project to create an animation from a portmanteau (two words combined to make a new word)

Summer Project

The summer project given was to design 10 contrasting characters, to coincide with our first semesters work. 

I wanted my characters to all of come from the same theme, and rather then have specific pairs just design 10 that automatically contrast.

I began with a theme of funfairs before settling on Freak Shows, I looked at old carnivals acts to help come up with characters which I feel are much stronger and will work better as contrasting pairs.