BA Animation

INITIAL EXPERIMENTS

At this point I knew I wanted to explore themes of religion and heritage but hadn’t decided to focus on my home city yet.

I liked the idea of exploring the concept of religion through the innocent lens of a child, so I crafted some collages and crude illustrations inspired by the artistic stylings of kids. I also thought it would be appropriate to experiment animating with some materials associated with kid’s crafts like food wrappers and sequins.

Before deciding to go forward in navigating Hinduism and Indian heritage in my piece I looked at other nationalities to potentially depict other ethnicities and/or nationalities. I created this cloudy sky from a mixture of watercolours, watercolour pencils and pastels, I could imagine a Chinese dragon dancing through them which would have been fun to animate. Once I decided to create my exhibition piece around the cultures of Leicester, I knew I should pick one of the many religions popular in the county.

These are the only two elements of my experiments that I used in my final outcomes. I edited the colours of my watercolour and pencil illustration to create a sandy beach and I played with saturation and lens glare on my Lord’s prayer collage animation to create the rose coloured and exciting perspective of a child.

CONCEPT

I like the idea of exploring two different perspectives or experiences of Leicester. Leicester is a very multicultural city and has a large Hindu population. I’d like to combine my experiences as a Christian raised Leicester person with research I gather about hindu life in Leicester. Despite living in Leicester my whole life I don’t know much about the hindu culture present in the city so it would be an enlightening opportunity to research it for this project. To present these two perspectives I have the idea to show a couple in a bed, on the long sides of the bed I want to project their dreams, in the middle I’ll have their dreams collide by combining elements from each dream. So my final outcome should be two looping animations that are to be projected onto an aspect ratio adjusted bed along with a depiction of two people on top of the bed and a creative combination of the two animations on the final side probably made with either madmapper or resolume. Before talking to Marianna, I thought my idea would require 5 projectors but after her workshop I learnt I could probably use two or three and map the animations to fit on different sides of the bed. Also in Marianna’s workshop I realisee I wanted to be more adventurous with the third side of my bed where the two dreams come together, I want to find interesting materials and ways to project things around the room.

RESEARCH

Leicester

To keep my piece authentic, I made sure to use the Leicester Mercury as my newspaper of choice for any scenes that would involve one, most notably this fish shop scene where full pages are displayed for the background.

Belgrave road in Leicester is refered to as one of England’s ‘Little Indias.’ It is also referred to as the ‘Golden Mile’ which some people think is due to the amount of jewellery shops. It is also home to a large amount of authentic indian resturants and in the winter months is abundtantly decorated with lights to celebrate both Diwali and Christmas. The road is actually called ‘The Golden Mile’ due to the amount of amber street and traffic lights that adorned the street in the 60’s. Since Diwali is called the ‘Festival of lights’ and Leicester’s Diwali festivities often take place along this road I have made sure to include plenty of street and road lights along with the regular Diwali lights in this background.

The Haymarket memorial clock tower is Leicester’s most recogniseable landmark and a popular meetingplace for me as a teenager when going out with friends. I want to show this clock tower in multiple points of my animation in different styles.

Leicester is best known (in my opinion) for being the place where King Richard III’s bones were found under a car park in 2012. In the spirit of this I have hidden King Richard III’s bones somewhere in my animation.

Characters

To depict the characters on top of the bed I experimented with this collage art style. I really liked the outcome of this but thought it was too fantastical. I decided I wanted the two people on top of the bed to be much more realistic to contrast the imaginitive and unreal nature of their dreams. I felt this would make my concept easier to interpret. I will cast people to play these characters ofr the exhibition in March.

I’ve writtn the hindu character to be passionate about art and art history,I imagine them working at the Leicester museum and Art Gallery located on New Walk. Whilst researching the museum, I came across this image of one of their dinosaur skeletons, I could imagine how it moved from the way it was positioned so I animated him a little to add in the background of one of my scenes. I imagine this character to be very creative in the way they approach the world and I want her dreams to reflect that. By taking inspiration from artists like Van Gogh, I have created backgrounds and textures that make this character’s world seem painterly and expressive.

For the other character, I want their dreams to seem a bit less excitedly carefree and instead more anxious, exploring themes of medication and loss. I want their dream to feel more unsettling yet still inventive and wonderful.

To do this I used compositional techniques to make the viewer feel out of control as they are thrust through the nonsensical narrative and also relied on incorporating unsettling scenarios such as sliding through the guts of a fish. To add to the unsettling atmosphere I made sure to use sound effects that’ll induce a sense of anxiety in the observee such as creaking wood. I also imagine this character taking an interest in fish and marine life. I want to have a scene with them going to Skegness (a popular holiday destination with people from leicester) and playing on the beach. As well as in this scene I want to show fish imagery throughout to show they have the ocean of the brain.

Religion

Leiceter is home to the largest Diwali celebration outside of India. I ran some of my ideas by Hindus to make sure they were respectful and received great feedback I made sure to stick by including not overly sexualising the appearances of the deities. I also asked if my scene where the statue comes to life and pets the parrot was appropriate and learnt that art of the gods is encouraged and there is already a lot of art depicting them interacting with animals. These two costumes are worn during the Leicester Diwali festival, they are intended to resemble Lakshmi and Ganesh. On the clock tower there are four statue figures along the edges, I have decided to replace these statues with the costumes for this background painting to create a fun morphing memory.

Growing up I had a lot of friends who could recite the Lord’s prayer from memory which inspired me to create a childlike collage of the Lord’s prayer out of bubble writing from sweet and snack wrappers. I had to look up the Lord’s prayer to find the right version because I knew it was commonly misheard. In Leicester we put up the city’s Christmas tree next to the clock tower every year, we also attach tinsel coming off the tower.

ANIMATICS

To craft a dreamy atmosphere, I incorporated a lot of transitions into my animatics. My initial storyboard fouse on ways I could present interesting transitions and dreamline andles to scenes. Unlike in a conventional narrative, these animatics don’t depict one chronological story each and instead act as a collection of different events that have taken place in the characers’ lives, representations of their mental state and how they navigate Leicester and the rest of their world.

I didn’t end up cutting much out from my animatics except a small May pole scene which is a barely noticeable exclusion due to how short it was going to be, the only other big change was the amount of time each section was going to be. Initially I was going to have each dream be 1 minute each on a loop however I figured it made more sense for the dreams to be different lengths as these were different people and it seemed arbitrary and needlessly constrained to have them both the exact same length, so I instead let myself be freer with how long I animated each scene.

BACKGROUNDS

2D ANIMATION

The art style for a lot of the 2D scenes in the hindu woman’s dream animation are loosly inspired by anime with the big round sparkly eyes. I’ve found in my experience that a lot of adults interested in art were anime fans as children so I thought this would be a fun trait to influence the style of this character’s dreams. In this Diwali scene I overlayed one of my hand made textures to make it appear more magical and also less digital and flat.

sketch

For most of the 2D handdrawn scenes with my Christian character I elected for a simpler art style which minimises the amount of detail, I thought this would help them seem small and adrift in the world. I also kept the colours monochrome and they were chosen in relation to the background. When this character is swept away by the sea they turn orange. This is to imply that in this stage of their life they are influenced by their own environment rather than them being the one to influence their environment.