ANIMATION LOG

Annotations about the production process

WEEK 1

In our first animation class we learned about the criteria of our project and

we watched some student made animation that were highly graded, such as

Cassandra’s Shadows, and ones that weren’t so highly graded. We also

watched some other animations over the internet.

We were split into groups and sent to the rostrooms with a task to create

stop motion animation of something fast, something slow, and something

exploding, particularly to experiment with movement. Before we started this

task, Ceiren quickly refreshed what we learned form the induction course about

Dragon Frame.

Julia and I worked together and we started discussing ideas for the real assessed animation. We both had something similar in mind, an animation that was more metaphorical than narrative driven, something perhaps that explored “change”, and a meaningful or even spiritual message behind it.

In the practice we also got a notion about looping and reusing previous shots in animation to help with the motion.

Finally everyone discussed any possible ideas they had in mind and we split in possible groups that could work with the same ideas.

Julia and I went to the library do some visual research and watch

some animation in order to thing of a concept for our animation. We

watched:

This Land is Mine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evIyrrjTTY

MAN (one of my favourite short animations)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU

Max Ernst (we were inspired by the ink on water effect)

http://vimeo.com/55165041

Julia showed me some of her own experiments.

WEEK 2

Julia created a pinterest for us so

we could create a kind of

moodboard and pin all the

inspirational things we found.

http://www.pinterest.com/jfabiolla/

IDEA

This week I had about 6 ideas/themes for animation and Julia and I had

a meeting where I showed her my ideas. We picked the two favourites and

she convinced me of how we could combine them both.

Main idea: the mind needs to be free, therefore I thought of the

metaphor of the mind being a caged bird that needs to be fed (with

knowledge, etc) until it gets too big for the cage that it “explodes” and

becomes free.

MY INSPIRATION

My idea was inspired by the open minded environment at

Goldsmiths and its challenging theory courses, as well as by

some other forms of art I’ve seen in the past such as

illustrations, poems and animation. The following slides get

together some pieces of work that have inspired me to come

up with this idea of the mind being a bird that needs to be set

free.

(From "The Last Night of the

Earth Poems" 1992)

Animated version of the poem by Monika

Umba:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsc3ItAKSLc

IDEA DEVELOPMENT

Julia and I developed the idea into a narrative.

A big bang turns into an embryo. We see a child exploring the world in a garden.

When sitting on a swing, a perspective change shows the child’s head which contains

a nest with an egg. In bed at night, the child reads a book and the egg slowly cracks

and a bird is born. The child becomes aware of the bird and interacts with it. While

sleeping, a shadow comes and imprisons the bird in a cage. When older, the

character goes into a search for the encaged bird that left a hole in their head. Three

searches are shown: knowledge, art and spiritual. During each search, we cut back to

the bird that is growing bigger in the cage. By the spiritual search, the bird is to big

and explodes the cage, with a lot of artsy things coming out and finally freeing the

bird.

MESSAGES

Beginning: we are all infinite beings

Ending: so is the mind – limitless, mysterious and

infinite.

Middle: in order to free our minds we need to “feed

it” with knowledge, art and spirituality.

ANIMATION INSPIRATION

Zero (opening) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOMbySJTKpg

Gulp (perspective change):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieN2vhslTTU

Our visual moodboard:

http://www.pinterest.com/jfabiolla/visual-moodboard/

STORYBOARD I

Julia and I had another meeting in order to make the storyboard and

simplify the idea as it was very complex to make. Julia suggested that we went

with something less obvious and less narrative driven, more symbolic,

therefore she suggested we get rid of the character and only have the bird.

She suggested that the embryo turned into a brain and then into a bird, and

then into a bud of an embryo, leading to the big bang, where the bird would

come out flying.

We started worrying about which material to use, and Julia was trying to

convince me to use oil paint on glass.

POEM

Bud of a being

Embryo

Brain

Bird

Bud

BANG

From the Bang

Comes the Bird

A shadow traps the bird

Into darkness

Encaged

Stillness

IN CLASS (WEEK 2)

Everyone discussed their ideas, and Osasu (new to class)

joined our group.

The three of us watched the oil paint animations by Em

Cooper that Julia pinned.

We experimented animating a bird flying and then a bird

being encaged by bars coming down.

Em Cooper

http://www.emcooper.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v

=BYyB_FGV1GY

https://www.youtube.com/watc

h?v=qxcJLyciaLY

OTHER OIL PAINT

INSPIRATION

Carine Khalife

http://vimeo.com/65467047

Martine Chartrand:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDfx1O6cGqs

Xin Li:

http://vimeo.com/77284580

Una Lorenenzen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgKl11lZqm0

BIRD EXPERIMENT

MANDALA INSPIRATION

Why mandalas? Mandalas are a spiritual symbol in religions such as

Buddhism and Hinduism, representing the universe. They often carry sacred

geometrical forms, usually, a square with four gates containing a circle with a

center point. Many mandalas resemble the appearance of a lotus flower, or the

flower of life, which are also sacred spiritual symbols.

I have created digital mandalas before, with a variety of different

techniques, and I believe it might be useful as an inspiration for the mandalas

we will need to hand paint in our animation.

I have also seen many tutorials of how to paint mandalas on CDs, stones,

etc, which may be useful.

Time lapse spinning mandalas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V573FpKb2Bk

Stop motion mandala painted on stone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzZ6THuNJ0U

DIY mandala painted on CD:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U50Am87344E

PRACTISING PAINTING

From our attempt to animate a painted bird in lesson, I found out that I do not

have very good painting skills. Julia is the one who can paint, however it is not

fair for her to make everything, therefore I decided to start practising.

MAYA ANGELOU POEM

WEEK 3

Julia texted me ideas that she had for our new storyboard. Sasu and I met with her to discuss and

finalise the idea.

The idea went a completely different way. Julia suggested:1. Starting with an abstract imagery that

resembled feathers, and then showing the bird wings and the bird flying across a stream and a beautiful

landscape, over a sweet bird song.

2. The bird rises up and the background gets more orangey as it gets closer to the sun. The shadow

comes and traps the bird, where we have a moment of darkness.

3. A close up of the bird face with human eyes show the bird in despair, trying to scream and we

hear crow sounds. The bird gets colourless and the setting becomes gloomy. It starts flapping its wings

in a cry for freedom again.

WEEK 3

4. Sasu and I had the same idea about zooming into the bird’s eye

pupil in order to show the three levels of freedom, which originally were

knowledge art and spirituality.

5.Cutting between the bird’s pupil, a storm inside of him, his wings

flapping and getting more colourful, a lot of colours mixing together, and

finally the pupil becomes the center of a mandala.

6. This is the climax of the bird’s enlightment, by then he is very

colourful and finally breaks free from the cage, flying away together with

thousands of other little birds.

IN CLASS

We finally completed our storyboard, using oil crayons and a lot of

colours to really picture the feeling of our animation.

Began to discuss about sound – beautiful bird song at the

beginning, a croak sound when trying to scream in the cage, perhaps

some bells and Tibetan bowls with OM chanting in the spiritual

enlightment process.

WEEK 4

Julia was in charge of doing the animatic, and I decided to research

possible sounds that we could use in our film.

I separated sound for three moods found in our film: gloomy,

inspiring/hopeful, and spiritual.

Julia and I got together to watch the animation and try out mixing

sound, since Osasu was ill and couldn’t join us.

The use of sound and the addition of some moving effects (i.e. zoom)

really added to the feeling of the animatic, giving a really vivid idea of how

it will look.

WEEK 4 IN CLASS

This week we needed to prepare to start filming. Firstly we established

the set up: lights and double glass plane. Then we discussed whether the

bird should be drawn with pastels on acetate, or oil paint too. We also

established that most cases where the bird is flying, the bird should be on

the top plane and the background on the lower plane. We even created a

new language to identify which shots happened in a double plane (DP) or

single plane (SP).

To create the double planes we needed to use video cassette tapes

as a base for the top plane.

We tried to make a schedule and this is where the challenge

began. Ceiren suggested we split jobs in order to organise the

shoot more easily and to maintain consistency in the artwork,

which resulted in Julia doing the birds (with oil paint on acetate),

me doing the backgrounds, and Sasu doing other stuff like

extreme close ups of the eyes.

We decided to start shooting some more straight forward

shots to give Julia time to finish the birds properly, and then start

filming the bird flights as soon as possible.

LIST OF BACKGROUNDS

Stream (forest)

Van Gogh starry night (storm)

Dark blue storm (lightning)

Blue sky (flight sequence)

Blue sky turns orange

Orange sky (sun)

Ashy gray (cage sequence)

Mandala background

Water + sky going orange

(breaking free sequence)

WEEK 5

This week we started filming. I have made all the

backgrounds we needed and discussed how some were not

necessary to be ready made.

Our first shoot was on Wednesday, and we filmed three

sequences of extreme close ups of the bird’s eyes.

Filming took 9 hours due to the amount of detail and the blinking

sequences. Sasu was in charge of the painting and I was directing and in

charge of Dragon Frame. She was painting over the traces she drew. We

learned to be careful when painting the glass because it has moved and it

created a mismatch jump between frames. I suggested taping the glass down

in order to prevent that.

On Friday I suggested that for the art sequence,

in order to turn it meaningful, we could make the

colourful paint form a nest with eggs (resembling the

little birds in the end).

We filmed the storm sequence, which presented

various challenges, taking another 9 hours to film.

In order to zoom into the eye and the pupil

become the storm, Julia suggested painting the close

up of the eye on glass over the starry night

background, leave the pupil blank and widen it up until

it becomes the whole setting.

She outlined how much of the frame was actually

under the camera to spare unnecessary work.

At first we tried using double planes where the top plane would be for the

pupil widening and the lower plane would go on top of the background for the

addition of stormy effects and stars.

I directed most of the set up of this scene and I very much disliked the way it

looked under the camera because the colours looked like they had a green

aspect to them. It also showed reflection of the tripod on glass, so I suggested

we removed the upper plane. This solved such issues.

In order for the widening of the pupil to work, Julia needed the pupil to start

quite small, and this was an issue as making the eye smaller wouldn’t cover the

whole background. I therefore suggested she painted the background white

representing the sclera of the eye and zoomed in more. Then as we opened the

pupil, the camera zoomed out slightly until it reached the framed Julia marked.

We played with lights to create lightening effects. Once we had the full

background on frame, we started animating the storm with stars and dark

shadowy clouds.

The sequence looked very fast and jumpy because we didn’t realise we

needed smoother movement of the clouds, we just changed it radically every

frame.

I came up with the solution of making them coming in slowly, adding a piece

to their front and removing a piece from their back.

They meet in the centre becoming a hurricane, inspired by Aleksandr Petrov

‘The Mermaid’ oil paint animation where there is also a storm sequence.

ALEKSANDR PETROV

The storm sequence that inspired us in ‘The Mermaid” at 9:02:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MpAr3rcEg0

On Saturday I was still very concerned about our storm sequence

because it was really fast. Thinking about a solution, I came up with

the idea of looping the shadows coming in, but in reverse, so they

come in and out and this motion of shadows coming in and out could

be looped to endure the storm sequence.

Sasu and I filmed the facial close up and the zoom in to the eye

took very long because it was slow movement. I mainly directed the

shot and took care of the focus. I suggested that as the camera moved

inwards, the glass should move slightly upwards to the side in order to

maintain the eye in a good frame.

• We wanted the bird to blink, and at first

Sasu would paint it frame by frame.

• To solve this, she came up with the idea

of painting the eyes on acetate.

• I suggested that she could use a double

plane of glass to put the acetate on top

and trace the eye shape. Then we’d cut

the eyes off the acetate and put them on

top of the eyes of the bird already

painted on glass.

• This spared us so much time and it was

a shame we didn’t think of it earlier.

• Meanwhile Sasu was painting the bird, I was

experimenting drawing and painting Mandalas.

• This experiment was very useful

because it made me realise a

series of things:

• It’s not easy to make mandalas

just out of paint, it is better to

trace it first.

• Mandalas are very detailed and

painting every detail takes really

long.

• The initial idea was to have the

mandala building up in front of

the camera but due to the two

issues I found, I decided that I

would make a mandala

beforehand and only build up the

last outer layer of the mandala.

WEEK 6

• Julia and I came during reading week to do

the art sequence

• We didn’t have much of a plan of how this

sequence would work, only that it would

form a nest. Nest inspiration:

• The art sequence didn’t escalate very well. Everything got a bit

smudgy and the tones don’t feel the same as the rest of the movie.

• We finished it quite fast and decided to try filming the opening

sequence of the feathers.

• The feather sequence took a lot of figuring out, we wanted a similar

effect to an animated music video we watched.

I figured out how to do the movements of the feathers, but it was still a very difficult

shot to manage, because we had to keep adding to the tip of the feathers and the oil paint

got mixed, and yellow became green, the blue became darker, everything looked smudgy.

We gave up on this shot

WEEK 7

In class, I started doing the artwork for the mandala, I experimented with several materials, CDs,

pastels, acrylic paint, in the end I drew a big mandala and Sasu traced it with oil paint over acetate.

Meanwhile I was doing mandala artwork, Julia was trying to work on the feather sequence again

(both Julia and Sasu had a go), but the issues were not solved. We reached a conclusion that we

could do the feathers on acetate and then trace them on top of another acetate, moving the parts

that needed to move, this way solving the problem of the oil paint mixing.

We decided to leave the feather sequence out. On the weekend we came to film the mandala

sequence. Julia suggested we cover the mandala painting with another acetate, and she wanted to

experiment with mirrors. The mirrors gave a kaleidoscope effect, we spent some time figuring out

how we could make this sequence. Julia was ill and we decided to leave it for another day.

MANDALA EXPERIMENTATION

WEEK 8

Wednesday – The mandala sequence was directed by me. In order to

make the colour of the shots warmer, we used orange filters made of

tissue paper. Julia covered the edges of the mirror with tape so it wouldn’t

scratch the glass. We played with mirrors in different positions to achieve

different effects and also we experimented different paces. We also

played with focus to give a trippy effect and show a change in the bird’s

own focus. Lastly we added a red filter to change the colour of the

mandala.

Friday – In class we started

filming our opening sequence of the

bird flight over stream. We had one

big issue, which was Julia painted the

bird flights on acetate, but she only

had two pieces of acetate, thus she

cut the birds out into squares. The

issue was the edges of the acetate

under the camera.

We tried several things in order to solve the issue, different lights, different

focus (the edges would become less noticeable but still would be visible,

especially with motion). We added colour filters to the lights in the ceiling (which

we kept because they gave a nicer colour to the scene). We tried painting the

edges with the background (which only made the edges more visible).

Finally, I figured out what

the solution would be. We’d

need to have the forest

background underneath a

glass, the bird on top of this

glass, and then have a higher

plane of glass on top of the

bird, where we would paint

over the edges of the acetate.

The flight was quite

fast, cuts and

establishings could help.

Saturday – bird flight blue sky

Sunday – bird flight orange sky

SYMBOLISM

Bird – free, it is colourful because it is creative, imaginative, inspiring.

The primary colours blue red and yellow are the colours that make all the

others: we can create limitless possibilities.

Nest and egg – rebirth

Storm – “Brain storm”, the bird is thinking

Human eyes – metaphor for the human

The shape and orange colour of mandala – resemble the sun

Sun – enlightment, warmth, life, Icaro greek myth